Edit: I didn’t actually think I’d need to put this here but unfortunately I think those kinds of people are here
Bigots are not welcome on my post and they are certainly not welcome on my post to co-opt it to spread bigotry
I am progressive myself and support human rights and LGBTQ+ people
Purity testing.
If you don’t align with the party narrative 100%, down to the atom, then you’re basically maga.
I don’t think people realize this is a major factor that drives people away from progressive politics.
When a conservative meets someone more conservative, they bitch about liberals. When a leftist meets someone more left than them they compete with each other to see who’s most “pure.”
This is a major problem.
And if you point this out to progressive people as to nobody likes them and how offputting/alienating they are. You are clearly MAGA or voted for Trump. Clearly if only you were ‘enlightened’ like them you’d 100% agree with them and have no separate ideas, opinions, or life experience of your own.
Yes, I have a friend who is extremely progressive but is still very much a slut shamer. She really looks down with disgust on women who like sex or have more boyfriends than she deems acceptable.
She also shows bigotry against other groups of people. Although she would never in a million years look down on someone because of their skin colour, she absolutely takes on a tribalistic Us vs Them mentality for other reasons. An example is the war in Ukraine started by Russia. Did Russia start it? Yes. Is Putin evil? Yes. Are there many Russians who support this war? Yes. BUT… not every Russian person in the world is inherently evil, not all of them want this, many are victims trapped in a system that will literally throw them out the god damned window if they dissent. And my friend absolutely fucking hates Russians. All of them. No empathy about the nightmare situation so many of them are stuck in. It has gotten so bad that she has literally started to hate her chickens that are a Russian breed. She has started assigning negative human traits to them and is insisting that they are negative and bad because they are Russian chickens. It’s honestly getting ridiculous.
Yes, I have a friend who is extremely progressive but is still very much a slut shamer. She really looks down with disgust on women who like sex or have more boyfriends than she deems acceptable.
I had forgotten about this kind of problem and I absolutely hate it
It reminds me of progressive people who want to ban anything lewd or sexual because it’s a “problem”
Or shaming women and LGBTQ+ people for liking sexual or lewd things and claiming it harms them, have these people even browsed the internet because there’s a whole culture of women and LGBTQ+ people liking lewd and sexual stuff and even creating it
I’ve even seen some progressive people shame LGBTQ+ and female creators of lewd and sexual content because it’s “harmful”
It’s not just men who like and create lewd and sexual stuff
Holy shit, I would unironically start trolling her… Give her chickens Jewish names so when she starts badmouthing them, she might have a clue she’s just being a bigot, exactly like Nazis in that respect of, “everyone of a group I don’t like is guilty”.
I’d start giving her nicknames of officers that stood over concentration camps if she continued.
This reminds me of someone who hates Chinese people because of COVID. It’s such a strange way to think.
I’m Asian. If I do anything well in life it’s because of privilege not because I worked 2 jobs while attending community college schooling and doing nothing else for myself other than to be at a better place. My effort feels completely and utterly dismissed by some of these people. They refuse to acknowledge my effort at all and instead they keep trying to dig deeper to find reasons why I’m “privileged”.
Constantly. Usually it takes the form of reducing topics to binary choices and/or purity tests.
- “You’re either with me or against me / You’re either part of the solution or part of the problem”
- Where “part of the solution” means doing exactly, and only exactly what they think you should be doing.
- “If you don’t satisfy all of my impossible requirements, you’re
as bad asa nazi” - “We only agree on 99 out of 100 things, so clearly you’re not to be trusted”
- etc
i really have never encountered someone like this.
unless the ‘purity test’ is being anti genocide or pro trans rights. you know, basic fundamental shit.
Genocide is a term that is both over and under used. There are currently about six genocides ongoing. I don’t see the point in trying to call someone out on it because no one is actually doing anything for or against it outside of a very small number of people.
If someone asks me if I’m anti genocide I assume they mean something they specifically consider a genocide and they are trying to use this as bait to get me to out myself in some way. They don’t actually expect I’m personally participating or countering it in any way.
Trans rights also is a loaded term now because there are a LOT of individual rights Trans people are needing to fight for all in parallel. It’s better to be specific.
Sure someone who says they are against trans people is awful, but I find folks set the bar in different places and use that to start an argument. The easiest example is, what age should someone be allowed to transition which is an intensely challenging question to answer even on a medical level.
The easiest example is, what age should someone be allowed to transition which is an intensely challenging question to answer even on a medical level.
That actually has a really simple answer, the right age is the one that the person and their doctors/medical professionals consider age appropriate for that individual. It isn’t up to society to restrict that decision. That is before the fact that medical professionals with direct experience with the person will have the best opinions on the topic.
This is also true for every single medical decision. Also true for every decision that doesn’t directly harm someone else.
I can’t imagine thinking any medical procedure has a simple answer, especially anything that permanently alters you.
Medical professionals are people, sometimes they make the right choice, sometimes the wrong choice. There are people who shop for the wrong answer, and also people who get the wrong answer and live in suffering. It is important to question things and have a discourse.
If my 16 year old came to me and asked to have their hearing removed as a solution to their mispohonia and that their therapist agrees and they found a surgeon… I don’t think I could just jump on board with that call.
I’m not convinced you understand what transitioning means. You can start transitioning without any medical intervention, and pretty much every trans person does socially transition before medical treatment because there’s really no alternative. When a younger person starts medical treatment, it will consist of puberty blockers. That’s it. Fully reversible, no known long-term side-effects, been used for 50 years for cis kids with precocious puberty. Suggesting that’s in any way equivalent to someone permanently deafening themselves is pretty disgusting, it’s typical terf bullshit and you should really think twice about whatever led you to that opinion.
The simple answer is that it is nobody’s business but the patient and the medical professionals.
A surgeon would not remove someone’s hearing for misophonia. They took an oath to do no harm and the vast, vast majority of medical professionals take that seriously on a personal level before getting into licensing and other requirements to practice.
The reasonable debate is at what age is that allowed. I do not think that has an easy answer other than legal age of majority for the country you are a citizen of. I think that the problem is there are harder answers than that worth seriously considering.
This is like saying there needs to be a minimum age for ADHD medications or birth control. Doctors are not giving minors sex changes all willy nilly and the procedures that they do provide like hormone suppression are proven safe, effective, and reversible.
Why does the general public or politicians need to pick an age for medical care that doesn’t involve them and doesn’t harm anyone?
- “You’re either with me or against me / You’re either part of the solution or part of the problem”
I have a lot of first hand experience with it via dating. In terms of outward Appearance and how I present I am an average looking straight cis white male. Mentally, in addition to being on the spectrum, that’s not really how I identify or am wired though. If anything, I’m probably more lesbian based on who I seem to get along with and am attracted to, lol.
As I am sure we are all (hopefully) aware there are a lot of men with very problematic behaviors (which is an entire other complex topic). As a result, within the liberal sphere I exist in it is very socially acceptable to shit on or otherwise have a negative bias against people that present like I do in a way that would not be acceptable if it were against another social group because of what they are.
I have had a number of interactions and conversations where my point of view/input/feelings/etc. were more or less dismissed or ignored by women when if I were a woman saying the exact same thing it wouldn’t be. I have also had people flat out say “that’s a very man thing to say” as a when what I am saying conflicts with their world view or how they feel and they can’t engage with it logically anymore.
Please note, I am leaving a ton of intricate context out of the above to try and avoid having to write a novel. I understand why women have the bias/reaction towards men who present like I do, and why it’s necessary. In the examples I am thinking of, these are women who know me, not strangers or randos. When discussing things I do my absolute best to have conversations in good faith and on the merits/logic of what is being said.
I don’t like pulling the autism card or saying that’s just how I feel, but I find that people are so unused to interacting with someone like me, rather than engage in the nuance of my experience and how it very much contradicts their world view, it’s much easier for them to find a reason to be dismissive of it. I also realize that from a third party perspective without any context my autistic behavior is indistinguishable from gas lighting.
don’t even get me started on how homophobic most ‘progressive’ women are. I’m straight and cis and white… but holy shit the disgusting things I’ve heard so called ‘liberal feminist’ women say about bi/gay men is vomit-inducing. but as for lesbians or trans women… they are perfect angels. trans men however, are traitors to their divine femininity or something.
they also love nothing more than to cry about how gender roles oppress them, but they cling to these 1950s expectations of men. i do not understand the obsession with 1950s gender roles so many women have. we’re basically supposed to be unfeeling ATMs that make them feel ‘protected’ from the ‘dangers’ of the world… by which they mean minorities and poor people.
Just head on over to the FuckCars community. Tons of ableism in there to witness.
I got banned from there for calling out their bullshit.
sure I was an asshole, but those people are so far up their own asses I didn’t think they’d notice.
Yeah, that’s generally the issue with a ‘Fuck<whatever>’ mentality.
Not “YayTransit” or something, but just relentless bemoaning cars and all who dare to use them. Such a community approach may serve the circle-jerk of those in agreement, but doesn’t really do anything to change the status quo closer to what they want.
Walkable stuff is nice, as is transit as it works so I’m on board for improvements to make that more feasible, but it’s kind of off putting the way they counduct themselves a good amount of the time.
I’ve disagreed with the whole fuck cars movement because it introduces more problems that are absolutely not worth having and they are ignorant of a lot of things
I’m also introverted and autistic and I like having my alone space when I need it, I don’t hate interacting with people but I only like interacting with people when I feel like it
Cars allow for that alone time where I can he alone when I want to and getting rid of cars and having to be forced to ride public transport would make that worser
Like?
Assuming everyone lives in a city where the weather is mild, the distances to things are short, there is reliable public transportation, and has significant infrastructure in place for walking/biking. Also assuming that everyone using a car instead of biking/walking is just being lazy, without spending a second to consider the elderly or infirm.
Assuming everyone lives in a city where the weather is mild, the distances to things are short, there is reliable public transportation, and has significant infrastructure in place for walking/biking
Could you elaborate about what you mean here? It appears to me as if the people participating in fuck cars are more bemoaning the lack of these things. The people frequenting that comm will be the first to complain that the vast majority of Americans have abysmal choices for non-automobile transportation.
Also assuming that everyone using a car instead of biking/walking is just being lazy, without spending a second to consider the elderly or infirm
This, I just simply dont see in that comm. I feel like the people in fuck cars comm would be the first ones to argue that the elderly and infirm are oftentimes the first ones to suffer due to lack of good public transportation options. Casting the fuck cars community as ableist and ignorant to the struggles of the disabled seems unfair - given how the mass transit community are some of the primary champions of low floor trams, paratransit, accessible stations with elevators, designated priority seating, etc…
I’ll use myself as an example.
There were some guys having an argument in another room, and it got increasingly intense. They were speaking some kind of Arabic. I thought they were genuinely mad at each other, but then one of them mentioned an athlete’s name and started listing what sounded like stats.
While telling this story at a party, I said something like “Arabic is a very angry-sounding language.” I noticed someone’s eyes get large, and I didn’t realize until then how racist I had unintentionally been.
Later, I thought more about it. Any language that you don’t understand sounds bad if people are having an emotionally charged conversation. It didn’t occur to me until then how easy it is to be thoughtless and racially insensitive.
I generally try not to be an asshole, but I messed up big time. I have no idea who he was, but I’ll always be grateful to the guy whose eyes got big. He gave me a much-needed reality check.
In American leftism there is a definite divide between black and white.
For example second wave feminism is often thought of as Women seeking entry into the workplace, but at the same time black feminists were trying to leave the workforce and take care of their own kids.
The labor movement has an explicitly racist history. A fact that Capitalists often took advantage of by leveraging black scabs who were often ineligible for union membership. Eugne Debs identified this as a problem with the socialist movement.
I’m not saying that racism is common among today’s lefties, just that white lefties are often ignorant of black American life and especially black radical thought and activism.
If you are vexed by Bernie Sanders’ struggle with black voters, you’re probably not very familiar with this history.
I put a poster up for a women/trans/non-binary inclusive group in an anarchist cafe, with their approval, only to get a literal essay from the cafe the next day about the miss-use of a word pertaining to our trans inclusivity. I can’t recall what the “right” word was supposed to be, and the poster’s verbiage was already researched/reviewed by trans people in the group. Due diligence was done.
Queue people leaving the group because we didn’t feel it was necessary to print new posters. They felt we should be less hostile to “people taking the time to educate.” Yeah, I made a few comments.
But you know what? I much prefer that to the kind of shit I had to deal with in conservative spaces. I worked on a couple political campaigns, had back room discussions where people don’t “educate” when you’re not one of them, they insult and back-stab you.
I can at least see the essay as an attempt to share knowledge, to include rather than exclude, even if it was from a place of self-importance and ignorance.
The friction I see in progressive spaces is usually about making things more equitable. It can be poorly thought out, but no one’s perfect. I prefer flawed inclusivity to hostile exclusivity.
Pulling the cultural appropriation card too much perhaps? Especially for cultures they do not understand beyond surface level. Just because someone is wearing something from another culture, it doesn’t mean it’s being appropriated. Obviously negative appropriation exists especially for instances where it is being done for profit. The problem is sometimes some people are reactionary and are too quick to label something as such without looking into it first.
On the not understanding cultures thing I think there was one time if I recall correctly where people got angry at a movie, TV show or media due to some misunderstanding it and assuming it was bigoted
I don’t even know if I’m remembering it correctly or not or if it even happened but the problem of misunderstanding cultures and assuming they are bigoted or are being bigoted is a very real problem
I know there’s like, actual cultural appropriation…but at this point I wish it never entered the cultural conversation at all tbh because I feel like it became weird bioessentialist shit. Like, just actively telling people what they’re allowed to be interested in is based on genetics. Not to mention cases where mixed race people have been assaulted over perceived hair appropriation (the idea that you can tell what race people are by looking at them is monoracist.)
At my most charitable, I think people are forgetting that most people aren’t influencers or public figures?
I left a Discord server I really enjoyed being on because they absolutely lost the plot with cultural appropriation bullshit.
Are we counting speciesism? Because “progressive” people are still generally a bunch of cruel, violent murderers.
Please do not co-opt my post, this has nothing to do with veganism qnd if your the type who thinks I should be dead for eating meat them you can kindly get off my post
I’m left-wing, progressive and I eat meat
I’ve seen liberal POCs say racist shit about White people more times than I can count.
I would also say that the idea of changing the definition of racism to mean that you cannot be racist toward a white person is also inherently racist. You could say, “person X is oppressed by people Y, so I understand why they are racist” but that doesn’t mean that they aren’t racist, or that it’s okay.
Oh, yeah, I’ve heard that line plenty of times. I agree, it’s just a convoluted argument to mask anti-White racism. Funnily enough, I’ve seen plenty of White people say it. Sad.
If you see a polite obviously rural person who has not said anything remotely questionable, a common comment is “but you probably wouldn’t want to know their political opinion” or “you probably don’t want their take on minorities or women”. To be folksy is to guarantee progressives brand them as right wing racist sexist bigots.
I’ve given up caring about all that shit. If people want to throw LGBTQ+ people into the line of fire to protect their moral fuckall stance on Gaza, fuck them as much as the ones abducting children.
I have watched progressives create the perfect breeding ground for fascism in the USA.
Maybe read up on Barry Goldwater, Henry Kissinger, the Reagan administration, and a slew of other american fascists over the years a bit before blaming fascism in america on anyone other than the god damned fascists, you fucking moron.
I’m not rising to your extremely uncivil bait.
If you do not think that the extremist pressure of well intended progressives have made idiot MAGAs lose their effing minds, you are not paying attention. btw… I lived through each of the fascists you mention. We progressives created the climate in which the Trump poison might propagate and thrive.
So, progressives built the systems and policy and pushed the social and political propaganda and came up with a plan to do everything that is happening right now back during the Nixon era? That was all progressives? They did all that? Are we blaming Weimar for the Nazis now, too?
We alienated all the Americans who voted for a fascist because we tried to rush programs and reforms faster than idiots can tolerate. We are surrounded by imbeciles. That was one key detail we absolutely failed to take into account. Our motto: we are the smug and the righteous, morons, you will evolve.
They said no.
Now we have fascism.
Obviously we are not entirely to blame as yes the foundational ground work was laid long ago. But there was a time when we might have worked harder to understand our opposition.
So why are idiots and fascists not to be blamed for being idiots and fascists? This is very much a “what was she wearing” rhetoric. Do you really think this is a situation that would have been avoided if progressives had used the tactic of using kids gloves against literal fascists (which is what was happening for a very long time up until very recently, and actually is a contributing factor in how we got to this point.)?
We alienated the theocratic indoctrinated extremists by what? Asking for people to be reasonable? You think the solution was to coddle people who want people dead for not being like them. That’s so fucking stupid and regressive.
So… the theocratic indoctrinated extremists” did NOT elect Trump.
Regular very arduously stupid people did.
Our neighbors.
They are the ones having picnics after church on the weekends.
Since you use the word extremist, allow me: we are the extremists.
At our peril.
We fostered and promoted a great deal of policy that normalized many situations that these relatively non-toxic strangers couldn’t stomach. Many pinched their noses while they voted for Trump and musk.
I’m not saying we progressives are entirely to blame, but I am saying that should our political system survive the present moment, we need to reach the reachable right, and if we don’t, we can suffer the boot and the gun.
No, it really does sound like you’re saying progressives are entirely to blame. This is so fucking stupid. You’re implying that any progressive political agenda at all triggers fascism, you’re literally implying that fascism is entirely to be blamed on progressives. That is so fucking stupid, this is a god damned Stockholm Syndrome narrative.
Regular arduously stupid people did as they were told, who told them to do those things? Blame the god damned fascists for fascism you propagandist fuck.
Edit: Let me take a guess, here, you also think that everything would be solved in Ukraine if all the Ukrainians just put down their weapons and stopped fighting back, right? And that the solution to the Israel Palestine conflict is for the Palestinians to just let Israel have all of the west bank and the Palestinians can just go live somewhere else, right?
Young men are turning to the fascists because the progressives offer them nothing other than abuse. Fascist let them play video games in peace and offer them jobs. Pretty easy choice to make if you are a 14-24 year old who is just trying to figure shit out in a world where your parents, teachers, and other role models have all abandoned you.
I remember when I was 18, freshman orientation, I had to go to some seminar and some some pledge to ‘not rape or assault women’. That was my first wake up call to how fucked up a lot of ‘leftism’ is. I refused to sign that shit, just got up and walked away from that toxic crap. Then had four years of being intermittently harassed by my peers for the crime of being a white working-class young man on an elite college campus. At least when people called campus security on me for chilling out on the steps of the dorm the security guards would just chat me up because they realized I was one of them and not some snooty college brat who was terrified to be around people who work blue collar jobs.
Why do I feel like I need to wash my hands after reading that?
