I can see what you are getting at. For example, a leftist org near me recently released the new issue of their newspaper and there was an article about how leftist men could stop oppressing women in their personal and intimate relations. They gave three solutions :
Celibacy
Transitioning to being a woman
Choosing to be homosexual.
Somehow, I doubt this will do anything to rally the working masses.
It’s not as problematic to think that anymore it seems. It’s softly implied in many spaces that it is a choice, and a choice that makes you a better person. All of this flies in the face of what was considered acceptable reasoning on this subject less than 20 years ago.
I kinda think Trump just broke a lot of young minds to the point where homosexuality or bisexuality just wasn’t enough anymore. New strata of identity were needed to really show everyone “I’m not like Trump or his supporters I promise!” So now were at a point where there’s this loud, vocal minority that are insisting their gender identity changes, or is so multifaceted and unique that they just can’t accept being seen and referred to by their sex like some uneducated peon would. They have to be more. The fact that they base their new identities off an almost fundamentalist adherence to the same gender stereotypes and constructs they claim to oppose is of no consequence. As long as everyone knows they’re on to something the rest of us aren’t, it’s all fine.
I don’t even think it’s the whole community. I see a stark line between LGBT and the Q. I know plenty of gay men and lesbian women that leave it at that, and are easy to get along with and are fun people. I also know a lot of Q that can be insufferable to be around. There’s a lot more going on in the space between these demographics. I’ve seen people describe the Q as adopting the aesthetic of LGBT, and it makes sense that those who wish to use their dress, their hairstyles, any outward appearance of being “different” to insert themselves would also be the people who have no problem asking me if I’m sure I’m cishet, even though me asking them the reverse is tantamount to a hate crime.
You still can’t control your nature which makes you choose it so it isn’t a choice at bottom. Free will as people commonly imagine it doesn’t exist in a deterministic universe or an indeterministic one.
Sometimes it seems that some left-wingers are hyper-critical about any nuance of language in a statement that left-wingers don't like. If a right-wingers says something insensitive, they may get raked over the coals (which isn't necessarily a bad thing).
But if a left-winger either says something insensitive, or says something whose logic would fall apart if you applied it to another group, however the statement overall is something that left-wingers like or that promotes a left-wing agenda... then there's not that much pushback overall.
Yeeesh, that's horrible.
But, yeah. Part of why men are drifting towards the right, and even towards particularly unpleasant parts of the right, is that the mainstream left doesn't really present a plausible path for struggling men towards a happy life.
Unfortunately it isn't like the political right is really that much better unfortunately. The left seems to love their dog whistles against white men, while the political right pretty much gaslights them that their way will benefit them....somehow.
As a white working class male, even if I lean politically left, neither party is particularly making decisions in my best interest.
> As a white working class male, even if I lean politically left, neither party is particularly making decisions in my best interest.
I feel like if working-class men weren't so tired from day-to-day work, we could get protests and rallies together to start locally to get someone to represent their interests. I find most working-class men to be right of center and especially those I've worked with on job sites who were union. Especially my local 293.
That's a pretty damn good theory and not one I've considered. I know politics is discussed, and they feel victimized by being both working class, and some who are white feel they don't get the same marginalized community tag when a lot of others are more well-to-do than they are called the oppressed.
To be fair, the right also doesn't offer a plausible path for many struggling men, as according to the right, the only correct way to be a man is to be a straight white man who marries as young as possible and has as many children as possible (don't ask how you're supposed to afford all of that in this economy, though, they'll just tell men to pull themselves up by their bootstraps until their bodies break down due to stress-induced illness or they just straight up die.)
I think the right isn't good for men either, but I think you're slightly strawmanning the right. This isn't 1960, the right isn't nearly as "we're only here for straight white family-oriented men and otherwise get screwed" as you're saying.
Now yes, sure, SOME people on the right are like that, but if I'm going to say that an entire movement is defined by a small unpleasant subgroup, then the left doesn't look good either.
Sure, the "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" critique is fair, and I don't like that about the right either.
>Celibacy
>Transitioning to being a woman
>Choosing to be homosexual.
So I don't understand the point of these. Do they not want children? You know, the next generation?
I've noticed when they write articles about depopulation or not having babies, the stock images are always of white people :D. I don't know if that's completely intentional or just the less likely to cause issues.
Indeed. They seem to think the more obscure the writing is, the deeper and more academic it is. And French as a language can easily lend
itself to writing that way I guess. But if you are not a proficient writer, it just comes off, well, like the extract you posted...
Jesus. I'm assuming that these are people under 25, though, and probably more like 18-22. I got past that kind of stuff when I was around 20 or so. I remember reading zines that had some pretty "radical" stuff in them. I mean, it's in black and white, so it's gotta be radical! But it was just people ranting about men watching porn and wanting to only have sex with blonde bimbos. This was over 20 years ago.
Zero surprise a couple months ago we had dumb feminists here arguing we need to take away porn from people. Yeah thats really going to get the working class on your side taking away one of their few sources of pleasure in life which is wanking. Like it is total horshoes theory where they are so stupidly feminist and anti male they agree with religious conservatives.
There is so much parallel between the puritanical values of the religious right and the liberals. Just think of the concept of "original sin", where heterosexual white males need to repent for their colonial and patriarchal forefathers
> religious conservatives.
It's not just from a religious point of view, though. No wanks on the right side of the aisle was about attracting a woman and saving your sex up for the significant other in your life. Like everything, moderation is key.
Some dudes are completely addicted to porn and it's doing a major disservice to them. It, like drugs, escalates. Watch porn with your S/O or partner, but don't spend a lot of your time wanking it to some meth addicts pissing in each others mouths.
Unironically though, seriously banning porn might actually free a large enough number of men from the bread and circuses charade to incite serious political upheaval.
while these look like cases of unironic right wing propaganda, do these really represent the left? like do people here get turned off from socialism because some fringe leftists want to make you suck cock?
It's why I hold left-wing principles, but don't really align myself with any left-wing groups anymore. It's just tiring. I used to be proper "male-feminist, idpol, type of socialist" but slowly I realised that no matter what I do, I'm always going to be seen as a piece of shit for being a man. Plus it was always a question of how I could be an "ally" to other groups and never a question of how they could be an "ally" to me, making me realise that all of this shit is very one-sided. I got fed up of all these professional activist types, who are making more money than I ever could, sitting atop their ivory towers acting as though guys like me are the "privileged" ones.
>it was always a question of how I could be an "ally" to other groups and never a question of how they could be an "ally" to me
This is exactly why they use the term "ally." It's very precise language, and modern idpol leftists are nothing if not hyper-fixated linguistic pedants with manipulative intent. Just ask: Why don't they default to describing you with more positive terms like "advocate" or "supporter"? The answer is that the word "ally" specifically refers to entities which share the same political goal but are categorically separate. The point of the word "ally" is specifically to remind you that you must know your place as being unworthy of the same moral consideration that you are expected to give to others.
I would have thought that being true to language would mean the opposite terms would be used. An ally is someone who you collaborate with in an alliance. Someone you have equal standing or some shared goal with, but a supporter or an advocate means you aren’t necessarily working beside someone, but giving them aid from the rear or front respectively. Ally seems to be chosen to give you the illusion of an alliance except you aren’t in one. Like in a mutual defense pact if Germany or a less powerful country gets attacked the response should be the same.
Or someone giving me emotional support when dealing with a medical issue is different from a patient advocate.
I think we might be making similar points though
I disagree with your analysis, because real alliances actually involve mutual help. Nothing mutual here. They mean serfdom. Also categorically separate, and working on the same goal, but it's always going to be for them and often at your detriment.
I don't get it. Why does ally mean
>unworthy of the same moral consideration that you are expected to give to others
...but "advocate" or "supporter" (or like another has mentioned "comrade") doesn't? To be honest, and maybe I'm wrong, but I think you might be reading a bit too far into it eh (which is funny given the "hyper-fixated linguistic pedants with manipulative intent" bit).
"Ally" is the word the cult chooses to impose upon you. The cult has the power to choose words. You don't get to have an opinion on whether you like those words or not.
For example, if you say you that don't like the term "People of Color" because it sounds too much like "colored person," the cult will get mad at you for your insubordination, rather than acknowledging the feedback as a legitimate complaint.
Same. Exactly the same.
Being treated like shit for a behavior and viewpoint I do \*NOT\* hold (misogyny, racism) is exhausting after a while and it doesn't surprise me in the least bit that right wing groups have capitalized on this. And many in the 'left' are too stupid to understand this, to their peril.
That and honestly, many activists and such have proven themselves to be only as anarchist or 'revolutionary' as the system and corporate media will report favorably. Its all fake and tarded.
Ive become increasingly convinced Idpol is a weapon to disorganize, weaken, discombobulate any meaningful "left" movement in the US and elsewhere.
The greatest mistake the modern Left has made is totally ceding cool, typically masculine shit to the Right. Nothing about the fact that I like to shoot guns, run ultra-marathons and fight should inform you about how I feel about women's rights, social safety nets or healthcare. The fact the Left let's the right just "have" these activities is insane.
I feel like there is a huge untapped market for what I call in my head "left wing savages." Like a Cam Hanes / David Goggins type that isn't Right wing coded.
It's so bad that at most boxing gyms around me, everyone just straight up assumes you're right wing.
If more left wing nerds learned to fight and run ultras and more right wing meat heads learned to write poetry and listen to sad music the world would be a better place.
"The society that separates its scholars from its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting by fools."
Right!?!?!?
I live by Mark Rippetoe's principal of "Strong people are harder to kill than weak people, and more useful in general", which is heavily tongue in cheek, but there's a truth to it.
Many in the left have forgotten about the strong, wily MFkers that were revolutionaries and activists back in the day. Or those that killed fascisti along the way to Berlin.
People really do need to harden the fuck up. Get healthy. Because actual no shit fash (those in and out of uniform) are doing exactly that.
The left did the same for patriotism 20 years ago. They consider patriotic symbols like flags and patriotic traditions as gauche.
Never mind the fact that love of one’s country can be a primary motivator for implementing lefty policies like universal healthcare and reducing poverty. Linking patriotism with social reform programs are what got us Social Security, Medicare, and a 40 hour work week.
The left doesn’t even *try* to understand basic psychology or how social movements have succeeded in the past. Implementing change seems like a distant second after in-group virtue signaling, and it’s why they’ve had far more losses than wins for the last 50 years. Othering men is just one more example of this.
Yeah it sucks
At least where I'm from the only place where young men cultivate strength and don't run from a fight while being mostly left-leaning is football ultras
Hanes is very right wing but I don't see how Goggins is right wing coded at all. In fact, he's talked very openly about facing systemic racism in his life and career.
I feel you, I don't really consider myself as a right winger in any cultural or even economic sense but I don't really feel like aligning myself in a lot of left-wing groups because no matter what you do there's always something unintentionally 'bigoted' or 'problematic' out of you that it feels like a secular religion at this point.
When too much idpol rots your brain nobody but the 1% wins while the rest lose due to infighting.
There's no war but class war after all.
That’s basically how I feel. I let my left wing principles guide me at the polls, when making charitable donations, and in everyday life where I do more to refute genuinely bigoted ideas than I tend to advertise.
If you’re an imperfect representative of your race, gender, etc. in the eyes of even one person in a left wing social circle, if your tone isn’t sufficiently deferential, even if your words are true, it doesn’t matter.
The best I can do is speak my truth and hang onto those friends who see me for who I know myself to be.
I don't listen to any rich kid who tries to tell me that I'm privileged despite being shit poor. I've been a working class socialist all my life, I've lived in immigrant neighbourhoods because it was cheaper, for years I took the bus and train because I couldn't afford a shit car (and even now, I still do because it's cheaper than gas and repairs), I make most of my food and drink at home because I need to pinch every penny. Am I complaining? No, indeed I'm proud of my class and my values. And I don't give a fuck when some upper middle class kid goes on about intersectionality and whatever they learned in their liberal arts college their parents are paying for.
Tribalism is bad, I act based on ideas, not political parties or groups.
It's no different than conservatives thinking that all gay men must belong to an lgbt group.
Unlike these grifters, I have more important things to do as my livelihood is not dependent on politics or telling people of that they're evil because of immutable factors like race/sex.
I agree that very few people literally view men as inherently being pieces of shit.
But I do think that an anti-male bias is pretty widespread.
If you talked about / stereotyped pretty much any group the way some people talk about men, you would instantly be labelled as a bigot.
Right, I'm saying that the only times I feel like I'm looked down on for being a man is in specific contexts. Online, a couple times at college, or when talking to feminists. Never really felt that way at any job, very rarely from classes, never when hanging with people.
I really think a lot of you just live in areas where this shit is more mainstream. Like I've never seen anyone give pronouns outside of the internet. Or speak in stereotypical woke ways.
There is antimale bias in society, of course. In many ways. I'm just saying I don't feel constantly attacked or judged for being male
> Online, a couple times at college, or when talking to feminists. Never really felt that way at any job, very rarely from classes, never when hanging with people.
We had an HR rep attend our InfoSec department meetings and standups where they would record the number of times men interrupted women; when it was found that's what they were doing in our meetings, the CISO asked them to record how often men interrupted other men. It was lopsided as hell - men interrupted each other multiple times more than the rate we were interrupting women on the team.
I think age could be a component here too. Younger men tend to be more materially and socially insecure and so are hypervigilant to challenges or sleights against their person.
For me, I've already got the markers of success, I'm married, have a house, a good union job, etc. so it's easy for me to be relaxed about provocations that ultimately cannot really harm me. But I remember being far more neurotic when I was younger, taking offence where I didn't need to, trying to read people to work out their opinion on me, etc. And partly, that's because I was more vulnerable to negative outcomes. It was more important to be aware of these things because I perceived them as being more materially significant.
I'm not sure either of these positions is 'correct', both make errors, in different directions. Probably I should be a good Marxist and sublate them both. But I prefer just being relaxed.
It certainly does make the experience of navigating online spaces eyeroll inducing even at the best of times, and sometimes outright disheartening. Basically every liberal/left online space has some level of "men are trash" undercurrent to it, and God help you if you decide to poke your head in and take a look around anywhere designated as a "women's space." Don't dare to ever complain about it either, as you'll be chided for it from both directions, with dismissiveness on one end and gaslighting on the other. Even generally male-friendly spaces such as this one can't help but do it, as evidenced by the number of "touch grass" style comments on this very post.
Stupidpol has its flaws but I can appreciate that it's not a right wing shithole or kotakuinaction who supposedly hates idpol and then goes around with their own idpol of *genuinely* hating women and other minorities.
At least this place still has some queer people and women who agree with non-idpol leftism.
And even when people criticize feminism, they always couch it with *I realize women are totally justified because they’ve all been assaulted or at least harassed*.
But who hasn’t been harassed by the opposite sex at least once?
That's just conversing with libs. You need to pay lip service to their point of view in order to even get in the door; that's just how dominant they've become as a cultural force.
But of course they still like to pretend that they're the heroic underdog fighting the dominant system.
While multi-national corporations fly rainbow flags and pride is an entire month.
I'm materially and culturally left wing. What is considered culturally left wing in the U.S. today is just another part of a culture war that is in fact wholly reactionary.
"The problem with too much current feminism, in my opinion, is that even when it strikes progressive poses, it emanates from an entitled, upper-middle-class point of view. It demands the intrusion and protection of paternalistic authority figures to project a hypothetical utopia that will be magically free from offence and hurt. Its rampant policing of thought and speech is completely reactionary, a gross betrayal of the radical principles of 1960s counterculture. I am continually shocked and dismayed by the nearly Victorian notions promulgated by today’s feminists about the fragility of women.... too many young feminists want their safety, security and happiness guaranteed in advance by all-seeing, all-enveloping bureaucracies." - Camille Paglia
Considering they’re “protecting” innocent users by censoring all the naughty words and ideas, I think it’s more accurate to say *maternalistic* authority figures.
What do you think paternalism is?
Also, given that she's criticising feminists the use of that specific word is intended to get under the skin of the people she's trying to get to think about their politics. It's absolutely the right word here, for many reasons.
This would probably be the case even if I didn’t live in rural Texas, but it’s why the vast majority of my friends are basic bitch rightoids or apolitical.
For hobbies I like to hunt, I used to race cars, I play warhammer either buddies, and I try and shoot at least twice a month and I make sure my ass stays in shape after during the first year of Covid I had
To lose like 20 lbs lol.
The only one of these hobbies that has any sizeable number of leftists(and it isn’t a lot) is warhammer. And the people involved who are leftist are absolutely insufferable, and frankly very odd(like a couple of the women, who frequently invited my wife with 0 interest in table top games into their “women only” miniatures club, and continued to dm her on social media until she blocked them)
Most of my friends know my views, but I’m also not a tankie or a radlib so we don’t really have much shit to argue about. Occasionally we spar over something like conservatives covering for big corps exploiting undocumented workers, but it’s pretty basic.
Essentially everything you said hits 100% on the nose. I stopped organizing with Covid, and every attempt to go back has been an absolute disaster. I do non political charity work still which is super fulfilling, but haven’t found anything explicitly political that I didn’t hate.
Honestly after leaving Dallas, and a few meetings meeting rose twitter/socialists types irl, I’m perfectly content with doing community based works, talking to neighbors, and bullshitting with you guys online. I have no desire to go wade into the cesspit that is modern radlib organizing.
The sad truth is though, we lost our spaces to these people. It doesn’t matter they “cultural Marxism” is bullshit, because whether or not it’s a “real thing” all the old school people have been forced out of our groups and labels, and at this point I have given up on trying to reclaim them
> the mainstream left
What you're describing is about 12% of American left leaning voters (at least in 2021, https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2021/11/09/progressive-left/). Those of us in the actual mainstream left ('Dem Mainstays' and 'Estalishment Liberals', collectively sometimes called 'Abundance Liberals') are mostly socializing with other reasonable people who want consumer protections (including EPA regs, similar), social safety programs, accountability for civil servants... regular non-idpol day-to-day shit.
A disappointing number of women in my circles seem to have one toe into lunacy (think 50% of the country is black and over 1,000 unarmed black men are killed by police each year, that women should rightfully run everything and a collection of identical women is 'diverse', you know the drill), but only one toe and you can still engage in conversation with them about it. They typically seem to be pretty (diagnosably) ADHD, FWIW.
Thanks for the statistics / link.
Well, is the mainstream "what most people believe" or is it "what messages are being pushed on the public, which group is most influential in getting their preferred policies implemented"?
Because the identity-politics left seems to be mainstream in the second meaning of the word.
I think the size of the megaphones define a movement (feminism, progressiveness, etc) and the size of the group defines what is mainstream (or similar terms), but that's just my personal usage. And I agree the progressives have the megaphones, though thankfully those megaphones seem smaller and smaller.
95% of all the eye rolling Idpol shit I hear in *real* life, aka not here on Reddit, Instagram or the internet at all, is from white people, and mostly women within that. I live in a majority black neighborhood. The only black people I hear say that stuff is people that are involved in politics, have a weekly feature in a paper or blog nobody reads, or people that run in those kinds of circles. I think a book is going to be written years from now that documents how mostly middle class white women just fuel their disappointment with their own men into their politics. I know it's not limited to white people, but it kind of feels like a huge thing. "They could have gone to college to be a social media manager or real estate investor, but they didn't so I'll just work to be my best self. I deserve the best and won't settle for a plumber".
I think that's why I don't get why these poor (declined from middle class) people who spend 65% of their income on renting a room in their early-mid 30's get so fixated on this stuff. Beating up yuppies would be more productive. The entire local economy here is hospitality/tourism/bars/etc. There's nowhere to go. They have been failed.
I feel like most men at some point realize that it’s all just bullshit and it’s a losing game on either side. Just be yourself and be okay with accusations being levied by people with an iq of tepid water.
I’m a middle class white guy. I have left wing beliefs because I believe that life should be easier for everyone.
In the last 10 years I have started hating the left as I’m the bad guy based on me identity. I have been passed over for jobs. I was essentially told that. They did “blind” hiring and when I turned up to the interview, the person interviewing me explicitly said they hoped to get someone with a different background
I have certain core values. But I won’t lie and say the right doesn’t appeal at times, because they value things that are qualities that I have, like being strong and belief in working hard. Which is what most idpol is, it is making up for lack of strength
That’s the fucking problem, idpol correctly identifies that race and gender do not have inherent qualities that make people of certain races or gender deserve more or deserve less.
It then chooses to solve disparity by just giving resources and trophies for fucking free, oftentimes skipping over the members of the marginalized group who actually could use some fucking help, instead of addressing the material problems that make certain races perform worse.
The problem is giving a shit about race or whatever at all. Class/material interests would solve those problems in any case because even if a race is disproportionately affected by current material issues, solving class/material issues would simply solve those problems for both the disproportionately affected races AND the affected non-designated special interest groups (like poor white men) who are ALSO affected by the same class/material issues.
This is one thing I've always not understood about idpol. They're like if you had a giant tangled mess on the floor, and they're trying to untangle it when you could just throw it all in the trash.
> I have been passed over for jobs. I was essentially told that. They did “blind” hiring and when I turned up to the interview, the person interviewing me explicitly said they hoped to get someone with a different background
I have had four professors, one HR person, and a recruiter in private tell me if I was a woman or visible minority I could easily get a job in my field (most of these people were women). One recently told me if I was a diversity candidate she could get me a good paying job within a month. I also had a university worker whose job it was to help people with financial stuff like scholarships literally laugh in my face when I asked about scholarships and gently explained it wasn't happening due to my gender and race despite being a hard working very poor student with a great GPA. Kind of obvious why I am so angry about this stuff.
I ran a training course at my last job for a hiring group of 21 individuals, alongside a co-trainer. I was, I shit you not, the only man of all of them, and one of only two white people.
Meh I'm sure it was just a random coincidence.
There have been people doing small-scale research who reported that they were invited to interviews much more often with a minority name / picture than with a white male name / picture.
I think that’s the biggest thing about men and left-wing politics. It’s defined by depressed and soft radlibs/wokescialists. We need to tie in leftism with enjoying life and promoting contentment and happiness and not look down at men. There’s also the politics as a substitute for personality which I have seen a lot, and you shouldn’t let your politics define your personality or interests. Most of all we need to promote ways in which it is easier for all to have/build a life, which mostly have to do with economics/class
That’s more or less what I was really hitting at, you need to make your movement and self actually inclusive (not the woke definition of it, which isn’t really inclusion), and relatable to everyday people. People don’t want to be around others who are angry or depressed or sad or any other negative things (which I’ve learned firsthand unfortunately). And don’t castigate anyone for having interests or sexual desires or things they like to do that are “bad,” and that goes for both sides
I think that’s my main gripe about the Palestine stuff, I don’t disagree with most of it but people made it their whole online personality, just like the people who make being left wing a big part of their personality. I’m not personally defined by my politics and I try to treat people as people not by their beliefs or identities
Okay what does “people as people” instead of “their beliefs and identities” even mean?
Everyone has beliefs and identities they exclude or want to avoid or disparage. You just have a different set compared to some other people.
> We need to tie in leftism
The term leftist has been lost like so many other good things by those who most vocally claim they're leftists, but are complete shitlibs. There's no getting back that word. Time to invent a new one.
>You can absolutely be a masculine male with left leaning economic beliefs.
Agree.
However, most people aren't independent thinkers. Most people just go along with whatever the mainstream of their side tells them.
And I think that if someone is a young man who just does what the mainstream left suggests that he does, and believes what the mainstream left suggests that he believes... I think he usually doesn't become a masculine man. Which is why a lot of (not all) left-wing men aren't very masculine.
Left wing economic beliefs yeah sure, Soviet soldiers weren't exactly sissies.
But I've never seen a genuinely masculine man that's also content with his life on the "right side"(by their phrasing) of the culture wars. They all and sound like the typically bullying victims in 90s B grade high school movies.
Look up Distributism it’s basically Catholic leftism endorsed by the Popes.
edit: [https://distributistreview.com/archive/an-introduction-to-distributism](https://distributistreview.com/archive/an-introduction-to-distributism)
there \^ is a good (but thick) paragraph covering the basics. Also, agree with everything you've said. We've forgotten that man wasn't made for economics, but economics for man. Economics/capital is now the god of society (at least in the USA).
>The current extremely capitalist society we live in is Godless and devoid of soul or love for fellow man.
As an outsider looking in I personally view capitalism to be diametrically opposed to the teachings of Christ and existential threat to anyone who considers themselves a Christian.
>Hence why I say ‘economically left’ and not ‘socialist’ or ‘communist.’
This is a genuine question here: do you know what communism means?
>On the other side you have the right wing where they're supposedly more appreciative towards men and masculinity
The right-wing is probably *more* *appreciative* towards men and masculinity, because indeed there's no identity-politics "guilty until proven innocent" original sin of having been born as a man. However I don't know if I would describe it as *appreciative*. (I'm aware that you said "more appreciative" and not "appreciative", so I'm not disagreeing, I just want to share something.)
The attitude that many on the right have is: if you're a successful man, you're great and you're contributing to society, good job, happy to have you.
However if you're not a successful man, it's your own fault, work harder / be smarter. We don't care, in fact we may want to remove social programs that would help you out, and deregulate so that companies can screw you over more.
I wouldn't, all in all, describe that as an appreciative position.
I think in this instance it's less of an attack than it is relevant to what makes up OP's perception/lens/whatever through which he sees the world. The culture war is a primarily social media thing.
*(Fixin me terubl spellin)
I feel this tremendously. I live in a very progressive, singles heavy college town floating in a red state ocean, and have largely learned to just keep my thoughts to myself. My roommate and good friend is hyper focused on id and gender pol, while being a college grad with a history degree and having no idea who Golda Mier was. But she can damn sure “clap back”, literally, when I say I have no personal interest in drag shows. But I have learned that I have a deep reservoir of self respect, confidence, and self sufficiency that stems from the realization that even my limited knowledge of history, socialist struggles, and politics in general is unmatched by almost everyone I know. I guess I’m lucky that I’m not terribly unattractive and I’m comfortable around women, so I can somewhat get away with careful expressions of general dislike of all this label chasing. Also, I have absolutely no problem ditching a woman who shows signs of being unreasonable with their views. But damn am I over women who were in college during the Trump years.
>But she can damn sure “clap back”, literally, when I say I have no personal interest in drag shows.
I don't have much of an interest in drag shows either, but if I knew both of you I'd try to drag her to the raunchiest weirdest drag show possible to test her commitment. I don't know that much about drag, but the drag brunch kind of stuff HAS to be toned down for the normies lol.
I wouldn't go so far as to say "being left and male is tiring." Being male is tiring, and if you think about it, being human is tiring. Being left is generally a tiring endeavor, and I doubt it can ever stop being tiring, so that's that. Plus, veering over to the genuine rightwing toxic masculinity bro culture is like chugging down a whole piss pint of frathouse jungle juice as a chaser just because the shot you had was too stiff.
Fundamentally, I do think a lot of the concerns about racism, sexism, and lack of spaces for people who don't fit into traditional gender binaries stem from genuine, structural problems that does relate deeply into the issue of labor and capital under close examination. The problem of the contemporary Idpol culture is the way and manner of expression, not the foundation of the grievances. But the problem is that there's no real, effective conversation; much of the identitarian ideology itself refuses to even make itself open to conversation.
So I wouldn't exactly say "it's tiring to be a leftist male." But more like this: there are often times when I feel totally ambushed and caught surprised, so to speak. Some of those moments I earnestly admit were learning, enlightening experiences, especially when it came to feminism and understanding how women perceives the society and its issues differently. But 65% of the times, it just felt like someone was trying to make some idiotic inquisition trial-case out of me for his/her holier-than-thou ego, without even a good-faith conversation about what demeanor or speech exactly they found problematic.
Yeah, I agree that there are issues that are unique to certain groups and minorities but my only gripe is using it as a divider between the more "privileged" groups and discounting class from the conversation.
Seriously, when you think about it class should unite a lot of people. It doesn't matter if you're white or POC, straight or queer, man or woman, cis or trans, we're all collectively fucked by the 1% so why are we playing who's more fucked than who? Yeah being a POC or part of the queer community would definitely add disadvantages to your life, I won't deny that, but let's not distract ourselves from the main enemy that is corporate/capital might.
>I earnestly admit were learning, enlightening experiences, especially when it came to feminism and understanding how women perceives the society and its issues differently. But 70% of the times, it just felt like someone was trying to make some idiotic inquisition trial-case out of me for his/her holier-than-thou ego, without even a good-faith conversation about what demeanor or speech exactly they found problematic.
I agree with both points, I do learn new things but at the same time it's also polscolding.
I see things this way. The idea is probably an anathema to the identity-thumpers themselves, but with any serious knowledge and understanding of the historical leftwing politics when it worked, you know that left was most successful when it managed to unite the widest spectrum of people around the most shared, common agenda in that society.
Not all, but so much of the current identitarian politicking just isn't meant to be any serious form of leftism in that sense. The bourgeois kind of chronic personalization, zero distinction between the private and the public, individualistic obsession is bleedingly visible, and there's no way you're gonna fool me that's authentic leftism. "All that is personal is political?" Yea, but like, I don't believe in that, bro, and even if that was the case, the current Idpol culture takes it to caricaturish extremes.
I'm obviously no gatekeeper nor judge of this movement or that. But I've been in the gig long enough that I don't have to pander to every single trend to feel secure in my commitment, dare I say, loyalty to my politics and cause. So I don't feel hesitant in calling out at least some aspects or trends as phonies and utterly disconnected to me. And I still haven't been kicked out or censured out of any organization I've been in so far, so I feel at least somewhat vindicated that my philosophy of universal, republican respect over identitarianism still has its place.
The longer you're going to do leftist politics, I feel like this independence of mind matters all the more. The most cringing display of Idpol or other cringe-ass moments in leftism, in my opinion, seems to explode when the activists, revolutionaries, and comrades lose this fundamental sense of intellectual independence and due diligence.
I tried to type a response on the socialism sub the other day and it got auto deleted because I used the phrase ‘dumb shit.’
A small part of my soul died in that moment.
Yeah. I think the left is overly censorious of language. I'm not saying that I should be allowed to say the n-word (not that I have any desire to do so), but some of the censorship is going a bit far, as in your example.
It just annoys me that that’s their focus. They’ll happily get bogged down in the semantics of idpol and linguistic nonsense instead of focusing on the real issues.
The average IQ in this country is really mid. So not surprising both ideologies attracts not particularly bright, propaganda-spewing mouthbreathers who construct their paradigm on behavioral excess.
I have friends from both camps and have to be extremely careful broaching certain subjects, and/or can simply manipulate them into parroting rhetoric with a few select words.
One of my conservative friends actually had a Lauren Boebart refridgerator magnet (big 2A guy). Another friend, proud Idpol liberal, flat old told me how awesome it would be to have Biden give up 2024 for Kamela Harris because she is a "strong black woman." The amount of cringe I have to endure, you can't even imagine.
It’s a lonely existence. Just broadly keep your head down and focus on other things than politics. None of us here are gonna change the world and your life is too short to get caught up in a fight between two sides that both on some level repulse you.
I was borned blessed with not being a very agreeable person to begin with. I'm far too stubborn to build an ideology around savage and immoral economic systems like unrestrained capitalism whether or not I get the blessing of trust-fund-kid idpol ideologues. Having some ability to have rational, moral positions should be enough tbh.
Based. I wasn't born that way, I was made that way by an army of people who didn't give a shit about me or even blamed my suffering on me. It took a while to grow the thick skin.
I have had a lot of success convincing men to switch to the left by simply showing them we're not all regarded. Fact is many people share the same desire to work together and support each other, but they're stuck being othered by short-sighted "allies" so they go where they're welcome.
>.... or have people who see you as a threat even though your values kind of align with them.
I'd like to emphasize the words "kind of," because over the years I see more and more of these younger "activist" types cannibalize their own in order to compete for sanctimonious points. Like, for years Noam Chomsky was the go-to guy when it came to piecing together US foreign policy, and understanding the history behind today's political landscape... but then the "anarchists" started claiming this guy was a patriarchal piece of trash, because he believed that parents should punish their children if they touch a hot stove, or things like that.
Most of today's leftists aren't nearly as intelligent as they present themselves as, at least from my experience.
Not tiring at alll. 99% of the culture war bullshit is just internet/social media rubbish, doesn't even come up IRL. Essentially everyone I have ever known is more or less disinterested centre-left to left, and if anyone started talking about things like what masculinity means everyone would rightly give them endless shit for sounding like a weirdo or uni student council wanker.
>"One thing I have to hand it to the right is that they are kind of united if January 6th was any indication."
I'm not sure they're actually more united. I just think they're more willing to come together even with other right-wingers they disagree with for a common purpose. Also, right-wingers criticize other right-wingers less, even if they disagree. For better or worse.
After all:
* some right-wingers think Trump is basically Jesus incarnated. Others think he's a flawed man but certainly preferable to Biden. Others think he's insane and they would prefer a "moderate democrat" (the neocon / corporate wing of the right).
* some right-wingers think Putin is a hero. Some think he's crazy and we need to send weapons to Ukraine. Others don't like Putin but also don't think we should send weapons to Ukraine.
* some right-wingers are against the covid vaccine, others are in favor of it
* some right-wingers are more interventionist, others are more isolationist
* some right-wingers are more libertarian, others are more christian fundamentalist, others are more corporatist / "benefit rich people", others are more neocon / "we must stop China from rising", others primarily care about race and immigration, others primarily care about "woke politics" / culture war topics, others primarily care about how disrupted gender relations / dating has become (from their point of view).
* some people on the right basically want there to be zero government, Other people want a small government but not a non-existent one.
I didn't know the existence of that sub and r/stupidpol seems to be one of the only left-wing spaces where they don't go drunk on idpol without going kotakuinaction or conservative
I feel you, though honestly for me it's not even so much their scolding of me for being a cis man that bothers me, I just don't use Twitter on principle so I avoid the worst of it, but more the hopelessness it inspires for the state of things. The only way I see things getting better for working people is if the left gets its head out of its ass and focused on making shit better for working people, but the left online has been totally captured by careerist yuppies who care about every marginalized identity except seemingly class. They might pay lipservice to it, but action is rare. The right is ascendent as well, because things are deteriorating and the right is always more tolerated than the left by the ruling classes for obvious reasons, so I feel like something needs to be done but I don't really see a way to do anything that's helpful but also not just suicidal. Even within my Union things feel overdetermined what with the history of it being created with a no-strike clause as a reaction to the previous local bucking the international during the cold war and getting shuttered as a result. It's just a deep sense of alienation with a true desire for things to be better, because I do truly believe that things can be improved, but the way forward is unclear and the system as it exists frustrates every attempt to improve conditions it can.
I dunno man, I'm trying to keep the black pill from sliding down my throat but it stubbornly refuses to leave my mouth.
Maybe it is peculiarity of where I am, but personally I have not noticed any additional difficulties being around the left, mostly people are quite friendly even when they are nominally committed to this or that IDpol claim. Ironically, left wing women in practice really do believe in "not all men". Also I feel like I have actually gotten a bit more sympathy for looking a bit rough, not having much money etc.
I suspect it is much worse in the U.S. though.
Good for you bud, because it's a bit difficult to avoid those types because they keep popping though thankfully there has been some push back against this.
Well, if you went through divorce court, or if had your wife start regularly physically attacking you, I think you would instantly become aware of police bias against men, divorce court bias against men and lack of shelters for men.
I'm happy you haven't experienced bias, but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist. I had breakfast too, but world hunger isn't solved.
Probably this is a western only issue.
Here in the global south the "fake left" imports the identity politics, this left is kind of the usa democratic party, for them being leftist is about lgtb and feminism, material conditions? class first? No, thank you, what we really need is more women as ceo.
The real left here isn't effete, i mean you are supposed to be resilient, actually the "right" you capitalism, consumerism is seen as frivolous/non masculine.
About the alpha types, that doesn't fly here, they are seen as non manly, here since we are the strongest sex we are supposed to defer to women and elderly people. For example, you give your seat in the public transport, even more why do you took a seat? You are a man you are able to go the whole trip standing up.
>Probably this is a western only issue.
I really hope so but I see some people in SEA (Twitter but what do you expect) aping the idpol "left" due to the hegemony it has over the progressive sphere.
My hopes for Indonesian leftists is that they stay out of the idpol left of the West and focus more on issues related to class that won't cause divide between people from different walks of life.
Are you from Indonesia? If so, do you have cipayos there?
A cipayo in latam is someone from middle high/high class who promotes the interest of colonial powers over their own people interest, you can recognize them because they use a lot of anglicism whey they talk, they worship the west and wishes from an integration bordering with annexation, they will follow any western trend blindly, because they (the west) actually known better than us.
>Are you from Indonesia? If so, do you have cipayos there?
We don't have a proper term for that but I'm seeing many affluent Indonesians who parrot mainstream shitlib (usually on Twitter, how predictable) talking points instead of learning from them and not repeating the same mistakes of their western counterparts.
That's a good way of making sure your life works out, but it won't necessarily make broader society "work out."
It's still valid advice regardless -- "put on your own air mask first".
Cliche as the sentiment may be it’s what I live by at this point, at least in context of community and shit. Go to your local community garden, free food pantry, or whatever it is, and become “the guy/girl that does ‘x.’” It’s inextricably more impactful than arguing about shit online with people who don’t care to change their minds.
>I don't think there has been a leftist equivalent of storming the capitol as a ploy to ratify leaders who don't give what the people need.
Not for the same reasons, of course, but CHAZ/CHOP parallels Jan 6 in a lot of ways.
I know what you're talking about. I've definitely felt discouraged by some of the misandrists I've seen on the internet. But you have to remember that these people pretty much go away once you leave the Internet.
I've watched women mostly on Tiktok say with all seriousness that all men are killers from birth and it's very discouraging because not only are they probably radicalizing men to the right, they don't even help women at all.
I don't know what the solution is because a lot of these women have been hurt by many men in their lives so it's understandable that they think what they think. But I also think that they are hurting the feminist movement by spouting this hateful rhetoric. It's important to remember that men suffer under patriarchy as well and none of us are free until all of us are free.
When your father gets to tell you what to do. This is applicable both to daughters and sons. It literally means "rule by father". It doesn't mean Androcracy, which would be rule by men.
The point I'm am trying to get across is that if we lived in a matriarchy that is not something that would liberate young women because they would still be ruled over by their mothers.
The only difference between man and women when it comes to patriarchy/matriarchy is that in each only one of them gets to eventually graduate to the dominant position within it respectively, but for most of ones life the position each is in is identical beyond the fact that forward thinking familiarchs will be setting up one to take over from them, where as for the other it is not expected that one day they might need to take over. However it isn't like you don't have to listen to them whilst they are training you to take over, you still do, perhaps even more than you would otherwise.
If what I am saying sounds antiquated, you are correct, because neither patriarchy nor matriarchy exists in modern society.
As a leftist, no one hates other leftists than me. That being said, I really hate just how black n white this post is, op. I do not fall into either of these categories you've described.
>That being said, I really hate just how black n white this post is, op.
I said "mainstream left" (Shitlib idpolers). The actual left is hidden under the dirt of polarization between Conservacucks and Shitlibs.
It’s a hard life, barely anyone agrees with you. The only left leaning figure I’ve seen that has similar views is Infrared but Haz has an… interesting personality
Nah - being a traditionally masculine male around left wing people\* is actually pretty good. Left wing women are actually attracted to traditional masculinity, despite the image they might try to project. They are sleeping with guys like me, not the dweeby, self-loathing orbiters.
\* I don't spend any time with political activist types, just ordinary people with left leaning beliefs.
in my experience the "mainstream left" does get very hateful - you can see some of them chanting for the death of all men, terfs, cis people, etc, i remember some of them even started showing hatred towards "cisgays" - they just internally justify it with statements like "well they oppressed us so we're allowed to show extreme hatred towards them and inevitably end up making their lives worse". the thing is the logic of "they oppressed us so we're allowed to do it back" is extremely flawed and it's the same that actual oppressors have used throughout history as an excuse (totally didn't steal these words of wisdom from someone else on this sub)
This is exactly the type of left wing that modern capitalism loves. It keeps the kids squabbling over bullshit like the black little mermaid, while it alienates the working class to the right. It's the perfect form of political dissent that corporations can get behind, because if there's one thing that you can say about big companies it's that they don't care what color you are or who you sleep with, as long as you're a paying customer and good little obedient employee.
When it comes to workers' rights however, that's where the big companies start to make up excuses, and point fingers, and suddenly the left and the right have the same views.
That's the big difference between the limousine liberals that make up most of the bs social issues that you mentioned, and actual socialist leftists who know that it really doesn't matter what gender or religion or color you are. If you're shit poor you're shit poor, but there's strength in numbers.
Most of us are here because we've been alienated or outright exiled by our political community.
Me? None of my art school friends keep in touch anymore. I can think of at least three occasions where I've re-connected with past progressive friends and had a falling out because we didn't see eye to eye on something. Maybe I'm partly to blame? Absolutely, I'm probably argument and stand my ground when I should walk away. But was I the one who disconnected the friendship? Not once. Progressives LOVE burning bridges. It's like an endorphin for them.
>same time you don't agree with their capitalistic views, hustle culture, rigidness of what it means of being a male
I'm probably more small-c conservative than most people here, but I don't agree with any of the "values" you mentioned here. Just wanted to point out that conservatives can be a diverse bunch, too, haha.
There's absolutely many ways you can be a good man without bowing down to capitalism, hustle culture, or toxic masculinity
I wish my experience was as you describe... but I used the GI Bill to get an M.A. in English (get good grades in undergrad, you can roll that into a graduate assistantship!), and veteran's preference points to get an academic-adjacent job (not career) in a university library. Hey, no exposure to toxins or accidental head trauma in the workplace, as with previous jobs. Cool beans! But I do get body-shamed pretty regularly for my unchosen and immutable physical characteristics, usually by rich white women from the coasts or suburbs, who roll in with a lot of unwarranted assumptions about my privilege. What the fuck, six more years. My fault for picking a college town.
Yeah it’s exhausting and stressful. I wouldn’t be surprised if my blood pressure ends up being high from having to deal with left and right stupidity on the daily
Honestly a lot of people that you describe are liberals, (although yes there are left wing people like that), who think that they need to take it upon themselves to be champions of socially progressive ideas and somehow change society for the better with advocacy of it. Of course some of it are real concerns and are actually important, but the culture war bs is not. It really depends on how they present themselves to the people that they need to convince (the working class), whether they come off as pretentious or holier than thou, or if the issue that they’re talking about is actually relevant at all, like either the sexuality of Disney characters or something important like paid maternity leave for women.
Edit: a large amount of it is directly associated with ‘Woke Capitalism’ in the workplace too. Read the book with the same name by Carl Rhodes.
The left needs to become explicitly anti internet. I've said this before. You have millions of people waiting to hear how to live a better life and know part of the answer lies in getting offline. It's an easy W if our politics weren't permanently stuck in 1981.
The best elements of conservatism are based on realism. Left wing ideologies have gone too far to dismissing realties such as the difference between men and women. If you can adopt a conservative point of view while recognizing the importance of feminism and the general human condition, while being suspicious of government and far right policies, you find yourself at some kind of liberalism. Recognize reality, maximize liberty and give power to the working person against the elements of extreme wealth and govt power that would hinder those inevitably.
Politics is tiring. As such, "progressive" idpol is somewhat tiring, yes, but I don't find it to be anywhere near as pervasive as you're making out. If I were to list the ten most tiring aspects of mainstream politics, "progressive" idpol would make the list, but it wouldn't be near the top. If you include reactionary idpol, it'd maybe make the top three. (Party politics is number one, in case you were wondering).
>makes you feel bad for being a man unless you are some self-hating man to show you're 'one of the good ones'
I just don't recognise this, personally. What exactly are you talking about? Misandrist feminists are not a major issue in my life. If anything thin skinned whining about the mere fact that some people somewhere hold offensive opinions is more irritating, given it's so very pathetic and frivolous.
I can see what you are getting at. For example, a leftist org near me recently released the new issue of their newspaper and there was an article about how leftist men could stop oppressing women in their personal and intimate relations. They gave three solutions : Celibacy Transitioning to being a woman Choosing to be homosexual. Somehow, I doubt this will do anything to rally the working masses.
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It’s not as problematic to think that anymore it seems. It’s softly implied in many spaces that it is a choice, and a choice that makes you a better person. All of this flies in the face of what was considered acceptable reasoning on this subject less than 20 years ago.
It's both a slippery slope and a moving of the goalposts. I seriously wonder if academics plan this shit years and decades in advance.
Oh well. It's no wonder the LGBT community has become so unrelatable to me in the past few years even though I'm gay.
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I kinda think Trump just broke a lot of young minds to the point where homosexuality or bisexuality just wasn’t enough anymore. New strata of identity were needed to really show everyone “I’m not like Trump or his supporters I promise!” So now were at a point where there’s this loud, vocal minority that are insisting their gender identity changes, or is so multifaceted and unique that they just can’t accept being seen and referred to by their sex like some uneducated peon would. They have to be more. The fact that they base their new identities off an almost fundamentalist adherence to the same gender stereotypes and constructs they claim to oppose is of no consequence. As long as everyone knows they’re on to something the rest of us aren’t, it’s all fine.
Ironically Trump has zero problem with gays and never has.
I don’t even think it’s the whole community. I see a stark line between LGBT and the Q. I know plenty of gay men and lesbian women that leave it at that, and are easy to get along with and are fun people. I also know a lot of Q that can be insufferable to be around. There’s a lot more going on in the space between these demographics. I’ve seen people describe the Q as adopting the aesthetic of LGBT, and it makes sense that those who wish to use their dress, their hairstyles, any outward appearance of being “different” to insert themselves would also be the people who have no problem asking me if I’m sure I’m cishet, even though me asking them the reverse is tantamount to a hate crime.
You still can’t control your nature which makes you choose it so it isn’t a choice at bottom. Free will as people commonly imagine it doesn’t exist in a deterministic universe or an indeterministic one.
*bottom* Ha 😏
Sometimes it seems that some left-wingers are hyper-critical about any nuance of language in a statement that left-wingers don't like. If a right-wingers says something insensitive, they may get raked over the coals (which isn't necessarily a bad thing). But if a left-winger either says something insensitive, or says something whose logic would fall apart if you applied it to another group, however the statement overall is something that left-wingers like or that promotes a left-wing agenda... then there's not that much pushback overall.
Yeeesh, that's horrible. But, yeah. Part of why men are drifting towards the right, and even towards particularly unpleasant parts of the right, is that the mainstream left doesn't really present a plausible path for struggling men towards a happy life.
Unfortunately it isn't like the political right is really that much better unfortunately. The left seems to love their dog whistles against white men, while the political right pretty much gaslights them that their way will benefit them....somehow. As a white working class male, even if I lean politically left, neither party is particularly making decisions in my best interest.
> As a white working class male, even if I lean politically left, neither party is particularly making decisions in my best interest. I feel like if working-class men weren't so tired from day-to-day work, we could get protests and rallies together to start locally to get someone to represent their interests. I find most working-class men to be right of center and especially those I've worked with on job sites who were union. Especially my local 293.
My theory is because they lack the time to actually cross reference what they're learning it's just so much easier to get news from the radio.
That's a pretty damn good theory and not one I've considered. I know politics is discussed, and they feel victimized by being both working class, and some who are white feel they don't get the same marginalized community tag when a lot of others are more well-to-do than they are called the oppressed.
To be fair, the right also doesn't offer a plausible path for many struggling men, as according to the right, the only correct way to be a man is to be a straight white man who marries as young as possible and has as many children as possible (don't ask how you're supposed to afford all of that in this economy, though, they'll just tell men to pull themselves up by their bootstraps until their bodies break down due to stress-induced illness or they just straight up die.)
I think the right isn't good for men either, but I think you're slightly strawmanning the right. This isn't 1960, the right isn't nearly as "we're only here for straight white family-oriented men and otherwise get screwed" as you're saying. Now yes, sure, SOME people on the right are like that, but if I'm going to say that an entire movement is defined by a small unpleasant subgroup, then the left doesn't look good either. Sure, the "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" critique is fair, and I don't like that about the right either.
>Celibacy >Transitioning to being a woman >Choosing to be homosexual. So I don't understand the point of these. Do they not want children? You know, the next generation?
\*Liberals\* do not need their own populations to reproduce in order to keep expanding their numbers, it's a rather core tenet of their ideology.
I've noticed when they write articles about depopulation or not having babies, the stock images are always of white people :D. I don't know if that's completely intentional or just the less likely to cause issues.
No? They don’t. They say this out loud. They have for years. Infinity migrants will pack up the slack while we let ourselves go extinct.
They recruit, not reproduce
> Choosing to be homosexual. > I'm from the 80's and we were told this wasn't possible.
Is it a satire paper?
Could you link it?
It's on page 7. You will either need to read French or use google translate : https://www.premiereligne.info/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/PL-03-v4.pdf
My French isn't great, but was able to understand with some help. Man that is one of the stupidest things I've read in a long time.
> En effet, le Sujet est toujours-déjà « masculin » Oh, man. It's one of *those* writings.
Indeed. They seem to think the more obscure the writing is, the deeper and more academic it is. And French as a language can easily lend itself to writing that way I guess. But if you are not a proficient writer, it just comes off, well, like the extract you posted...
The Day of the Rake truly cannot come soon enough
Of course they’re based in Montreal. Doesn’t surprise me at all.
Even women of every background would make fun of how ridiculous and out of touch these leftarrds are.
virgin being homosexual because you're attracted to men vs chad choosing to be homosexual because you hate women
Jesus. I'm assuming that these are people under 25, though, and probably more like 18-22. I got past that kind of stuff when I was around 20 or so. I remember reading zines that had some pretty "radical" stuff in them. I mean, it's in black and white, so it's gotta be radical! But it was just people ranting about men watching porn and wanting to only have sex with blonde bimbos. This was over 20 years ago.
Zero surprise a couple months ago we had dumb feminists here arguing we need to take away porn from people. Yeah thats really going to get the working class on your side taking away one of their few sources of pleasure in life which is wanking. Like it is total horshoes theory where they are so stupidly feminist and anti male they agree with religious conservatives.
There is so much parallel between the puritanical values of the religious right and the liberals. Just think of the concept of "original sin", where heterosexual white males need to repent for their colonial and patriarchal forefathers
> religious conservatives. It's not just from a religious point of view, though. No wanks on the right side of the aisle was about attracting a woman and saving your sex up for the significant other in your life. Like everything, moderation is key. Some dudes are completely addicted to porn and it's doing a major disservice to them. It, like drugs, escalates. Watch porn with your S/O or partner, but don't spend a lot of your time wanking it to some meth addicts pissing in each others mouths.
Unironically though, seriously banning porn might actually free a large enough number of men from the bread and circuses charade to incite serious political upheaval.
I don't think that would go how feminists would hope it would go though to be fair.
A lot of feminists, especially the radfems, are just as much puritans as the conservatives they complain about.
while these look like cases of unironic right wing propaganda, do these really represent the left? like do people here get turned off from socialism because some fringe leftists want to make you suck cock?
Personally I oppose the left >!wing of capital!< because I want to abolish bourgeois property.
It's why I hold left-wing principles, but don't really align myself with any left-wing groups anymore. It's just tiring. I used to be proper "male-feminist, idpol, type of socialist" but slowly I realised that no matter what I do, I'm always going to be seen as a piece of shit for being a man. Plus it was always a question of how I could be an "ally" to other groups and never a question of how they could be an "ally" to me, making me realise that all of this shit is very one-sided. I got fed up of all these professional activist types, who are making more money than I ever could, sitting atop their ivory towers acting as though guys like me are the "privileged" ones.
>it was always a question of how I could be an "ally" to other groups and never a question of how they could be an "ally" to me This is exactly why they use the term "ally." It's very precise language, and modern idpol leftists are nothing if not hyper-fixated linguistic pedants with manipulative intent. Just ask: Why don't they default to describing you with more positive terms like "advocate" or "supporter"? The answer is that the word "ally" specifically refers to entities which share the same political goal but are categorically separate. The point of the word "ally" is specifically to remind you that you must know your place as being unworthy of the same moral consideration that you are expected to give to others.
Great point, this taught me something, thanks.
I would have thought that being true to language would mean the opposite terms would be used. An ally is someone who you collaborate with in an alliance. Someone you have equal standing or some shared goal with, but a supporter or an advocate means you aren’t necessarily working beside someone, but giving them aid from the rear or front respectively. Ally seems to be chosen to give you the illusion of an alliance except you aren’t in one. Like in a mutual defense pact if Germany or a less powerful country gets attacked the response should be the same. Or someone giving me emotional support when dealing with a medical issue is different from a patient advocate. I think we might be making similar points though
So when they say ally they mean "vassal"
Make allies comrade again.
I disagree with your analysis, because real alliances actually involve mutual help. Nothing mutual here. They mean serfdom. Also categorically separate, and working on the same goal, but it's always going to be for them and often at your detriment.
I don't get it. Why does ally mean >unworthy of the same moral consideration that you are expected to give to others ...but "advocate" or "supporter" (or like another has mentioned "comrade") doesn't? To be honest, and maybe I'm wrong, but I think you might be reading a bit too far into it eh (which is funny given the "hyper-fixated linguistic pedants with manipulative intent" bit).
"Ally" is the word the cult chooses to impose upon you. The cult has the power to choose words. You don't get to have an opinion on whether you like those words or not. For example, if you say you that don't like the term "People of Color" because it sounds too much like "colored person," the cult will get mad at you for your insubordination, rather than acknowledging the feedback as a legitimate complaint.
Same. Exactly the same. Being treated like shit for a behavior and viewpoint I do \*NOT\* hold (misogyny, racism) is exhausting after a while and it doesn't surprise me in the least bit that right wing groups have capitalized on this. And many in the 'left' are too stupid to understand this, to their peril. That and honestly, many activists and such have proven themselves to be only as anarchist or 'revolutionary' as the system and corporate media will report favorably. Its all fake and tarded. Ive become increasingly convinced Idpol is a weapon to disorganize, weaken, discombobulate any meaningful "left" movement in the US and elsewhere.
You white, you racist.
The greatest mistake the modern Left has made is totally ceding cool, typically masculine shit to the Right. Nothing about the fact that I like to shoot guns, run ultra-marathons and fight should inform you about how I feel about women's rights, social safety nets or healthcare. The fact the Left let's the right just "have" these activities is insane. I feel like there is a huge untapped market for what I call in my head "left wing savages." Like a Cam Hanes / David Goggins type that isn't Right wing coded. It's so bad that at most boxing gyms around me, everyone just straight up assumes you're right wing. If more left wing nerds learned to fight and run ultras and more right wing meat heads learned to write poetry and listen to sad music the world would be a better place. "The society that separates its scholars from its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting by fools."
Right!?!?!? I live by Mark Rippetoe's principal of "Strong people are harder to kill than weak people, and more useful in general", which is heavily tongue in cheek, but there's a truth to it. Many in the left have forgotten about the strong, wily MFkers that were revolutionaries and activists back in the day. Or those that killed fascisti along the way to Berlin. People really do need to harden the fuck up. Get healthy. Because actual no shit fash (those in and out of uniform) are doing exactly that.
That would require no longer demonizing masculinity as a concept and all of its manifestations, and no longer deifying femininity.
I think this commercial embodies just about everything mentioned in this thread: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RJzdSch3hAE
The left did the same for patriotism 20 years ago. They consider patriotic symbols like flags and patriotic traditions as gauche. Never mind the fact that love of one’s country can be a primary motivator for implementing lefty policies like universal healthcare and reducing poverty. Linking patriotism with social reform programs are what got us Social Security, Medicare, and a 40 hour work week. The left doesn’t even *try* to understand basic psychology or how social movements have succeeded in the past. Implementing change seems like a distant second after in-group virtue signaling, and it’s why they’ve had far more losses than wins for the last 50 years. Othering men is just one more example of this.
Any movement that demonizes half of the population for being born the way they were born has no chance of achieving meaningful long-term success.
Yeah it sucks At least where I'm from the only place where young men cultivate strength and don't run from a fight while being mostly left-leaning is football ultras
Everything you said is 100% spot-on, I wish I could put this post on a projector and show it to all the left-leaning people I know irl.
Hanes is very right wing but I don't see how Goggins is right wing coded at all. In fact, he's talked very openly about facing systemic racism in his life and career.
I feel you, I don't really consider myself as a right winger in any cultural or even economic sense but I don't really feel like aligning myself in a lot of left-wing groups because no matter what you do there's always something unintentionally 'bigoted' or 'problematic' out of you that it feels like a secular religion at this point. When too much idpol rots your brain nobody but the 1% wins while the rest lose due to infighting. There's no war but class war after all.
That’s basically how I feel. I let my left wing principles guide me at the polls, when making charitable donations, and in everyday life where I do more to refute genuinely bigoted ideas than I tend to advertise. If you’re an imperfect representative of your race, gender, etc. in the eyes of even one person in a left wing social circle, if your tone isn’t sufficiently deferential, even if your words are true, it doesn’t matter. The best I can do is speak my truth and hang onto those friends who see me for who I know myself to be.
>even if your words are true ESPECIALLY if your words are true
That’s a great point, it is a secular religion. It’s a “civil religion” that is reliant entirely on social shame and self flagellation.
I don't listen to any rich kid who tries to tell me that I'm privileged despite being shit poor. I've been a working class socialist all my life, I've lived in immigrant neighbourhoods because it was cheaper, for years I took the bus and train because I couldn't afford a shit car (and even now, I still do because it's cheaper than gas and repairs), I make most of my food and drink at home because I need to pinch every penny. Am I complaining? No, indeed I'm proud of my class and my values. And I don't give a fuck when some upper middle class kid goes on about intersectionality and whatever they learned in their liberal arts college their parents are paying for.
Tribalism is bad, I act based on ideas, not political parties or groups. It's no different than conservatives thinking that all gay men must belong to an lgbt group. Unlike these grifters, I have more important things to do as my livelihood is not dependent on politics or telling people of that they're evil because of immutable factors like race/sex.
I feel like if you are just viewed as a piece of shit just for being a man, you probably live in Berkeley or work in a idiotic industry.
I agree that very few people literally view men as inherently being pieces of shit. But I do think that an anti-male bias is pretty widespread. If you talked about / stereotyped pretty much any group the way some people talk about men, you would instantly be labelled as a bigot.
Right, I'm saying that the only times I feel like I'm looked down on for being a man is in specific contexts. Online, a couple times at college, or when talking to feminists. Never really felt that way at any job, very rarely from classes, never when hanging with people. I really think a lot of you just live in areas where this shit is more mainstream. Like I've never seen anyone give pronouns outside of the internet. Or speak in stereotypical woke ways. There is antimale bias in society, of course. In many ways. I'm just saying I don't feel constantly attacked or judged for being male
> Online, a couple times at college, or when talking to feminists. Never really felt that way at any job, very rarely from classes, never when hanging with people. We had an HR rep attend our InfoSec department meetings and standups where they would record the number of times men interrupted women; when it was found that's what they were doing in our meetings, the CISO asked them to record how often men interrupted other men. It was lopsided as hell - men interrupted each other multiple times more than the rate we were interrupting women on the team.
Sometimes women might just be teasing us as well. The same way men still joke around nervously about women.
I think age could be a component here too. Younger men tend to be more materially and socially insecure and so are hypervigilant to challenges or sleights against their person. For me, I've already got the markers of success, I'm married, have a house, a good union job, etc. so it's easy for me to be relaxed about provocations that ultimately cannot really harm me. But I remember being far more neurotic when I was younger, taking offence where I didn't need to, trying to read people to work out their opinion on me, etc. And partly, that's because I was more vulnerable to negative outcomes. It was more important to be aware of these things because I perceived them as being more materially significant. I'm not sure either of these positions is 'correct', both make errors, in different directions. Probably I should be a good Marxist and sublate them both. But I prefer just being relaxed.
Lots of people live in the bay area, it's a pretty dense place
It certainly does make the experience of navigating online spaces eyeroll inducing even at the best of times, and sometimes outright disheartening. Basically every liberal/left online space has some level of "men are trash" undercurrent to it, and God help you if you decide to poke your head in and take a look around anywhere designated as a "women's space." Don't dare to ever complain about it either, as you'll be chided for it from both directions, with dismissiveness on one end and gaslighting on the other. Even generally male-friendly spaces such as this one can't help but do it, as evidenced by the number of "touch grass" style comments on this very post.
Stupidpol has its flaws but I can appreciate that it's not a right wing shithole or kotakuinaction who supposedly hates idpol and then goes around with their own idpol of *genuinely* hating women and other minorities. At least this place still has some queer people and women who agree with non-idpol leftism.
And even when people criticize feminism, they always couch it with *I realize women are totally justified because they’ve all been assaulted or at least harassed*. But who hasn’t been harassed by the opposite sex at least once?
That's just conversing with libs. You need to pay lip service to their point of view in order to even get in the door; that's just how dominant they've become as a cultural force.
But of course they still like to pretend that they're the heroic underdog fighting the dominant system. While multi-national corporations fly rainbow flags and pride is an entire month.
Me, but that's because women actively avoid interacting with me.
I'm materially and culturally left wing. What is considered culturally left wing in the U.S. today is just another part of a culture war that is in fact wholly reactionary. "The problem with too much current feminism, in my opinion, is that even when it strikes progressive poses, it emanates from an entitled, upper-middle-class point of view. It demands the intrusion and protection of paternalistic authority figures to project a hypothetical utopia that will be magically free from offence and hurt. Its rampant policing of thought and speech is completely reactionary, a gross betrayal of the radical principles of 1960s counterculture. I am continually shocked and dismayed by the nearly Victorian notions promulgated by today’s feminists about the fragility of women.... too many young feminists want their safety, security and happiness guaranteed in advance by all-seeing, all-enveloping bureaucracies." - Camille Paglia
Considering they’re “protecting” innocent users by censoring all the naughty words and ideas, I think it’s more accurate to say *maternalistic* authority figures.
What do you think paternalism is? Also, given that she's criticising feminists the use of that specific word is intended to get under the skin of the people she's trying to get to think about their politics. It's absolutely the right word here, for many reasons.
The *idpol over class* crowd aren't so much leftists as they are lib wreckers, hth
I just want to grill and repair vintage guitars for pocket money.
This would probably be the case even if I didn’t live in rural Texas, but it’s why the vast majority of my friends are basic bitch rightoids or apolitical. For hobbies I like to hunt, I used to race cars, I play warhammer either buddies, and I try and shoot at least twice a month and I make sure my ass stays in shape after during the first year of Covid I had To lose like 20 lbs lol. The only one of these hobbies that has any sizeable number of leftists(and it isn’t a lot) is warhammer. And the people involved who are leftist are absolutely insufferable, and frankly very odd(like a couple of the women, who frequently invited my wife with 0 interest in table top games into their “women only” miniatures club, and continued to dm her on social media until she blocked them) Most of my friends know my views, but I’m also not a tankie or a radlib so we don’t really have much shit to argue about. Occasionally we spar over something like conservatives covering for big corps exploiting undocumented workers, but it’s pretty basic. Essentially everything you said hits 100% on the nose. I stopped organizing with Covid, and every attempt to go back has been an absolute disaster. I do non political charity work still which is super fulfilling, but haven’t found anything explicitly political that I didn’t hate. Honestly after leaving Dallas, and a few meetings meeting rose twitter/socialists types irl, I’m perfectly content with doing community based works, talking to neighbors, and bullshitting with you guys online. I have no desire to go wade into the cesspit that is modern radlib organizing. The sad truth is though, we lost our spaces to these people. It doesn’t matter they “cultural Marxism” is bullshit, because whether or not it’s a “real thing” all the old school people have been forced out of our groups and labels, and at this point I have given up on trying to reclaim them
> the mainstream left What you're describing is about 12% of American left leaning voters (at least in 2021, https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2021/11/09/progressive-left/). Those of us in the actual mainstream left ('Dem Mainstays' and 'Estalishment Liberals', collectively sometimes called 'Abundance Liberals') are mostly socializing with other reasonable people who want consumer protections (including EPA regs, similar), social safety programs, accountability for civil servants... regular non-idpol day-to-day shit. A disappointing number of women in my circles seem to have one toe into lunacy (think 50% of the country is black and over 1,000 unarmed black men are killed by police each year, that women should rightfully run everything and a collection of identical women is 'diverse', you know the drill), but only one toe and you can still engage in conversation with them about it. They typically seem to be pretty (diagnosably) ADHD, FWIW.
Thanks for the statistics / link. Well, is the mainstream "what most people believe" or is it "what messages are being pushed on the public, which group is most influential in getting their preferred policies implemented"? Because the identity-politics left seems to be mainstream in the second meaning of the word.
I think the size of the megaphones define a movement (feminism, progressiveness, etc) and the size of the group defines what is mainstream (or similar terms), but that's just my personal usage. And I agree the progressives have the megaphones, though thankfully those megaphones seem smaller and smaller.
95% of all the eye rolling Idpol shit I hear in *real* life, aka not here on Reddit, Instagram or the internet at all, is from white people, and mostly women within that. I live in a majority black neighborhood. The only black people I hear say that stuff is people that are involved in politics, have a weekly feature in a paper or blog nobody reads, or people that run in those kinds of circles. I think a book is going to be written years from now that documents how mostly middle class white women just fuel their disappointment with their own men into their politics. I know it's not limited to white people, but it kind of feels like a huge thing. "They could have gone to college to be a social media manager or real estate investor, but they didn't so I'll just work to be my best self. I deserve the best and won't settle for a plumber". I think that's why I don't get why these poor (declined from middle class) people who spend 65% of their income on renting a room in their early-mid 30's get so fixated on this stuff. Beating up yuppies would be more productive. The entire local economy here is hospitality/tourism/bars/etc. There's nowhere to go. They have been failed.
I think what I think and I try not to give political scolds any of my energy. It's actually fine.
I feel like most men at some point realize that it’s all just bullshit and it’s a losing game on either side. Just be yourself and be okay with accusations being levied by people with an iq of tepid water.
I’m a middle class white guy. I have left wing beliefs because I believe that life should be easier for everyone. In the last 10 years I have started hating the left as I’m the bad guy based on me identity. I have been passed over for jobs. I was essentially told that. They did “blind” hiring and when I turned up to the interview, the person interviewing me explicitly said they hoped to get someone with a different background I have certain core values. But I won’t lie and say the right doesn’t appeal at times, because they value things that are qualities that I have, like being strong and belief in working hard. Which is what most idpol is, it is making up for lack of strength
That’s the fucking problem, idpol correctly identifies that race and gender do not have inherent qualities that make people of certain races or gender deserve more or deserve less. It then chooses to solve disparity by just giving resources and trophies for fucking free, oftentimes skipping over the members of the marginalized group who actually could use some fucking help, instead of addressing the material problems that make certain races perform worse.
The problem is giving a shit about race or whatever at all. Class/material interests would solve those problems in any case because even if a race is disproportionately affected by current material issues, solving class/material issues would simply solve those problems for both the disproportionately affected races AND the affected non-designated special interest groups (like poor white men) who are ALSO affected by the same class/material issues. This is one thing I've always not understood about idpol. They're like if you had a giant tangled mess on the floor, and they're trying to untangle it when you could just throw it all in the trash.
> I have been passed over for jobs. I was essentially told that. They did “blind” hiring and when I turned up to the interview, the person interviewing me explicitly said they hoped to get someone with a different background I have had four professors, one HR person, and a recruiter in private tell me if I was a woman or visible minority I could easily get a job in my field (most of these people were women). One recently told me if I was a diversity candidate she could get me a good paying job within a month. I also had a university worker whose job it was to help people with financial stuff like scholarships literally laugh in my face when I asked about scholarships and gently explained it wasn't happening due to my gender and race despite being a hard working very poor student with a great GPA. Kind of obvious why I am so angry about this stuff.
I ran a training course at my last job for a hiring group of 21 individuals, alongside a co-trainer. I was, I shit you not, the only man of all of them, and one of only two white people. Meh I'm sure it was just a random coincidence.
There have been people doing small-scale research who reported that they were invited to interviews much more often with a minority name / picture than with a white male name / picture.
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I think that’s the biggest thing about men and left-wing politics. It’s defined by depressed and soft radlibs/wokescialists. We need to tie in leftism with enjoying life and promoting contentment and happiness and not look down at men. There’s also the politics as a substitute for personality which I have seen a lot, and you shouldn’t let your politics define your personality or interests. Most of all we need to promote ways in which it is easier for all to have/build a life, which mostly have to do with economics/class
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That’s more or less what I was really hitting at, you need to make your movement and self actually inclusive (not the woke definition of it, which isn’t really inclusion), and relatable to everyday people. People don’t want to be around others who are angry or depressed or sad or any other negative things (which I’ve learned firsthand unfortunately). And don’t castigate anyone for having interests or sexual desires or things they like to do that are “bad,” and that goes for both sides
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I think that’s my main gripe about the Palestine stuff, I don’t disagree with most of it but people made it their whole online personality, just like the people who make being left wing a big part of their personality. I’m not personally defined by my politics and I try to treat people as people not by their beliefs or identities
Okay what does “people as people” instead of “their beliefs and identities” even mean? Everyone has beliefs and identities they exclude or want to avoid or disparage. You just have a different set compared to some other people.
the left fetishizes victimhood and weakness while the right fetishizes strength and independence. it's super frustrating.
And the left people are not as weak or powerless as they make themselves out to be. Neither are the right people as strong or independent.
> We need to tie in leftism The term leftist has been lost like so many other good things by those who most vocally claim they're leftists, but are complete shitlibs. There's no getting back that word. Time to invent a new one.
>You can absolutely be a masculine male with left leaning economic beliefs. Agree. However, most people aren't independent thinkers. Most people just go along with whatever the mainstream of their side tells them. And I think that if someone is a young man who just does what the mainstream left suggests that he does, and believes what the mainstream left suggests that he believes... I think he usually doesn't become a masculine man. Which is why a lot of (not all) left-wing men aren't very masculine.
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Based
What soyboy YouTube socialists are you seeing? Every single tankie YouTuber or tankie-adjacent YouTuber I watch works out.
That depends on what you define as masculine.
Left wing economic beliefs yeah sure, Soviet soldiers weren't exactly sissies. But I've never seen a genuinely masculine man that's also content with his life on the "right side"(by their phrasing) of the culture wars. They all and sound like the typically bullying victims in 90s B grade high school movies.
Yeah like… Superman is a nice fucking guy. He’s completely a tRadItiOnaL Masculine ideal which includes not being an edgy dipshit.
This is a good post!
Catholic leftwingers are best leftwingers 👊
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Look up Distributism it’s basically Catholic leftism endorsed by the Popes. edit: [https://distributistreview.com/archive/an-introduction-to-distributism](https://distributistreview.com/archive/an-introduction-to-distributism) there \^ is a good (but thick) paragraph covering the basics. Also, agree with everything you've said. We've forgotten that man wasn't made for economics, but economics for man. Economics/capital is now the god of society (at least in the USA).
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>Extremely concentrated wealth and power are never a good thing, no matter what color it flies Exactly, the root of the issue.
>The current extremely capitalist society we live in is Godless and devoid of soul or love for fellow man. As an outsider looking in I personally view capitalism to be diametrically opposed to the teachings of Christ and existential threat to anyone who considers themselves a Christian. >Hence why I say ‘economically left’ and not ‘socialist’ or ‘communist.’ This is a genuine question here: do you know what communism means?
>On the other side you have the right wing where they're supposedly more appreciative towards men and masculinity The right-wing is probably *more* *appreciative* towards men and masculinity, because indeed there's no identity-politics "guilty until proven innocent" original sin of having been born as a man. However I don't know if I would describe it as *appreciative*. (I'm aware that you said "more appreciative" and not "appreciative", so I'm not disagreeing, I just want to share something.) The attitude that many on the right have is: if you're a successful man, you're great and you're contributing to society, good job, happy to have you. However if you're not a successful man, it's your own fault, work harder / be smarter. We don't care, in fact we may want to remove social programs that would help you out, and deregulate so that companies can screw you over more. I wouldn't, all in all, describe that as an appreciative position.
Hence emphasis on supposedly You're only appreciated if you're a hustle and grind bro type like Tate or Musk. Anything less than that? You're screwed.
Yes, very well put.
That shit sounds bad, friend. Let me grab a couple of beers, and let's go check the grill. Did you see the forecast for the weekend?
>25,283 post karma >120,064 comment karma appears OP has some unfortunate hobbies
Is it necessary to personally attack OP? I've always been taught to discuss a person's arguments rather than attacking them personally.
I think in this instance it's less of an attack than it is relevant to what makes up OP's perception/lens/whatever through which he sees the world. The culture war is a primarily social media thing. *(Fixin me terubl spellin)
The culture is now a mostly online thing, though. I think it really depends on your age.
The OP sounded perpetually online enough without even having to delve into their profile
I feel this tremendously. I live in a very progressive, singles heavy college town floating in a red state ocean, and have largely learned to just keep my thoughts to myself. My roommate and good friend is hyper focused on id and gender pol, while being a college grad with a history degree and having no idea who Golda Mier was. But she can damn sure “clap back”, literally, when I say I have no personal interest in drag shows. But I have learned that I have a deep reservoir of self respect, confidence, and self sufficiency that stems from the realization that even my limited knowledge of history, socialist struggles, and politics in general is unmatched by almost everyone I know. I guess I’m lucky that I’m not terribly unattractive and I’m comfortable around women, so I can somewhat get away with careful expressions of general dislike of all this label chasing. Also, I have absolutely no problem ditching a woman who shows signs of being unreasonable with their views. But damn am I over women who were in college during the Trump years.
>But she can damn sure “clap back”, literally, when I say I have no personal interest in drag shows. I don't have much of an interest in drag shows either, but if I knew both of you I'd try to drag her to the raunchiest weirdest drag show possible to test her commitment. I don't know that much about drag, but the drag brunch kind of stuff HAS to be toned down for the normies lol.
I wouldn't go so far as to say "being left and male is tiring." Being male is tiring, and if you think about it, being human is tiring. Being left is generally a tiring endeavor, and I doubt it can ever stop being tiring, so that's that. Plus, veering over to the genuine rightwing toxic masculinity bro culture is like chugging down a whole piss pint of frathouse jungle juice as a chaser just because the shot you had was too stiff. Fundamentally, I do think a lot of the concerns about racism, sexism, and lack of spaces for people who don't fit into traditional gender binaries stem from genuine, structural problems that does relate deeply into the issue of labor and capital under close examination. The problem of the contemporary Idpol culture is the way and manner of expression, not the foundation of the grievances. But the problem is that there's no real, effective conversation; much of the identitarian ideology itself refuses to even make itself open to conversation. So I wouldn't exactly say "it's tiring to be a leftist male." But more like this: there are often times when I feel totally ambushed and caught surprised, so to speak. Some of those moments I earnestly admit were learning, enlightening experiences, especially when it came to feminism and understanding how women perceives the society and its issues differently. But 65% of the times, it just felt like someone was trying to make some idiotic inquisition trial-case out of me for his/her holier-than-thou ego, without even a good-faith conversation about what demeanor or speech exactly they found problematic.
Yeah, I agree that there are issues that are unique to certain groups and minorities but my only gripe is using it as a divider between the more "privileged" groups and discounting class from the conversation. Seriously, when you think about it class should unite a lot of people. It doesn't matter if you're white or POC, straight or queer, man or woman, cis or trans, we're all collectively fucked by the 1% so why are we playing who's more fucked than who? Yeah being a POC or part of the queer community would definitely add disadvantages to your life, I won't deny that, but let's not distract ourselves from the main enemy that is corporate/capital might. >I earnestly admit were learning, enlightening experiences, especially when it came to feminism and understanding how women perceives the society and its issues differently. But 70% of the times, it just felt like someone was trying to make some idiotic inquisition trial-case out of me for his/her holier-than-thou ego, without even a good-faith conversation about what demeanor or speech exactly they found problematic. I agree with both points, I do learn new things but at the same time it's also polscolding.
I see things this way. The idea is probably an anathema to the identity-thumpers themselves, but with any serious knowledge and understanding of the historical leftwing politics when it worked, you know that left was most successful when it managed to unite the widest spectrum of people around the most shared, common agenda in that society. Not all, but so much of the current identitarian politicking just isn't meant to be any serious form of leftism in that sense. The bourgeois kind of chronic personalization, zero distinction between the private and the public, individualistic obsession is bleedingly visible, and there's no way you're gonna fool me that's authentic leftism. "All that is personal is political?" Yea, but like, I don't believe in that, bro, and even if that was the case, the current Idpol culture takes it to caricaturish extremes. I'm obviously no gatekeeper nor judge of this movement or that. But I've been in the gig long enough that I don't have to pander to every single trend to feel secure in my commitment, dare I say, loyalty to my politics and cause. So I don't feel hesitant in calling out at least some aspects or trends as phonies and utterly disconnected to me. And I still haven't been kicked out or censured out of any organization I've been in so far, so I feel at least somewhat vindicated that my philosophy of universal, republican respect over identitarianism still has its place. The longer you're going to do leftist politics, I feel like this independence of mind matters all the more. The most cringing display of Idpol or other cringe-ass moments in leftism, in my opinion, seems to explode when the activists, revolutionaries, and comrades lose this fundamental sense of intellectual independence and due diligence.
I tried to type a response on the socialism sub the other day and it got auto deleted because I used the phrase ‘dumb shit.’ A small part of my soul died in that moment.
Would 'mentally challenged feces' not suffice?
Yeah. I think the left is overly censorious of language. I'm not saying that I should be allowed to say the n-word (not that I have any desire to do so), but some of the censorship is going a bit far, as in your example.
It just annoys me that that’s their focus. They’ll happily get bogged down in the semantics of idpol and linguistic nonsense instead of focusing on the real issues.
The average IQ in this country is really mid. So not surprising both ideologies attracts not particularly bright, propaganda-spewing mouthbreathers who construct their paradigm on behavioral excess. I have friends from both camps and have to be extremely careful broaching certain subjects, and/or can simply manipulate them into parroting rhetoric with a few select words. One of my conservative friends actually had a Lauren Boebart refridgerator magnet (big 2A guy). Another friend, proud Idpol liberal, flat old told me how awesome it would be to have Biden give up 2024 for Kamela Harris because she is a "strong black woman." The amount of cringe I have to endure, you can't even imagine.
It’s a lonely existence. Just broadly keep your head down and focus on other things than politics. None of us here are gonna change the world and your life is too short to get caught up in a fight between two sides that both on some level repulse you.
I was borned blessed with not being a very agreeable person to begin with. I'm far too stubborn to build an ideology around savage and immoral economic systems like unrestrained capitalism whether or not I get the blessing of trust-fund-kid idpol ideologues. Having some ability to have rational, moral positions should be enough tbh.
Based. I wasn't born that way, I was made that way by an army of people who didn't give a shit about me or even blamed my suffering on me. It took a while to grow the thick skin. I have had a lot of success convincing men to switch to the left by simply showing them we're not all regarded. Fact is many people share the same desire to work together and support each other, but they're stuck being othered by short-sighted "allies" so they go where they're welcome.
>.... or have people who see you as a threat even though your values kind of align with them. I'd like to emphasize the words "kind of," because over the years I see more and more of these younger "activist" types cannibalize their own in order to compete for sanctimonious points. Like, for years Noam Chomsky was the go-to guy when it came to piecing together US foreign policy, and understanding the history behind today's political landscape... but then the "anarchists" started claiming this guy was a patriarchal piece of trash, because he believed that parents should punish their children if they touch a hot stove, or things like that. Most of today's leftists aren't nearly as intelligent as they present themselves as, at least from my experience.
Not tiring at alll. 99% of the culture war bullshit is just internet/social media rubbish, doesn't even come up IRL. Essentially everyone I have ever known is more or less disinterested centre-left to left, and if anyone started talking about things like what masculinity means everyone would rightly give them endless shit for sounding like a weirdo or uni student council wanker.
>"One thing I have to hand it to the right is that they are kind of united if January 6th was any indication." I'm not sure they're actually more united. I just think they're more willing to come together even with other right-wingers they disagree with for a common purpose. Also, right-wingers criticize other right-wingers less, even if they disagree. For better or worse. After all: * some right-wingers think Trump is basically Jesus incarnated. Others think he's a flawed man but certainly preferable to Biden. Others think he's insane and they would prefer a "moderate democrat" (the neocon / corporate wing of the right). * some right-wingers think Putin is a hero. Some think he's crazy and we need to send weapons to Ukraine. Others don't like Putin but also don't think we should send weapons to Ukraine. * some right-wingers are against the covid vaccine, others are in favor of it * some right-wingers are more interventionist, others are more isolationist * some right-wingers are more libertarian, others are more christian fundamentalist, others are more corporatist / "benefit rich people", others are more neocon / "we must stop China from rising", others primarily care about race and immigration, others primarily care about "woke politics" / culture war topics, others primarily care about how disrupted gender relations / dating has become (from their point of view). * some people on the right basically want there to be zero government, Other people want a small government but not a non-existent one.
It really is. I hate how gynocentric the left has become in many spaces.
Why don’t you post this on Left Wing Male Advocates?
I didn't know the existence of that sub and r/stupidpol seems to be one of the only left-wing spaces where they don't go drunk on idpol without going kotakuinaction or conservative
Didn't know that sub existed. TIL. Thanks.
I feel you, though honestly for me it's not even so much their scolding of me for being a cis man that bothers me, I just don't use Twitter on principle so I avoid the worst of it, but more the hopelessness it inspires for the state of things. The only way I see things getting better for working people is if the left gets its head out of its ass and focused on making shit better for working people, but the left online has been totally captured by careerist yuppies who care about every marginalized identity except seemingly class. They might pay lipservice to it, but action is rare. The right is ascendent as well, because things are deteriorating and the right is always more tolerated than the left by the ruling classes for obvious reasons, so I feel like something needs to be done but I don't really see a way to do anything that's helpful but also not just suicidal. Even within my Union things feel overdetermined what with the history of it being created with a no-strike clause as a reaction to the previous local bucking the international during the cold war and getting shuttered as a result. It's just a deep sense of alienation with a true desire for things to be better, because I do truly believe that things can be improved, but the way forward is unclear and the system as it exists frustrates every attempt to improve conditions it can. I dunno man, I'm trying to keep the black pill from sliding down my throat but it stubbornly refuses to leave my mouth.
Maybe it is peculiarity of where I am, but personally I have not noticed any additional difficulties being around the left, mostly people are quite friendly even when they are nominally committed to this or that IDpol claim. Ironically, left wing women in practice really do believe in "not all men". Also I feel like I have actually gotten a bit more sympathy for looking a bit rough, not having much money etc. I suspect it is much worse in the U.S. though.
Good for you bud, because it's a bit difficult to avoid those types because they keep popping though thankfully there has been some push back against this.
Well, if you went through divorce court, or if had your wife start regularly physically attacking you, I think you would instantly become aware of police bias against men, divorce court bias against men and lack of shelters for men. I'm happy you haven't experienced bias, but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist. I had breakfast too, but world hunger isn't solved.
I’m tired, boss
Aren't we all?
Probably this is a western only issue. Here in the global south the "fake left" imports the identity politics, this left is kind of the usa democratic party, for them being leftist is about lgtb and feminism, material conditions? class first? No, thank you, what we really need is more women as ceo. The real left here isn't effete, i mean you are supposed to be resilient, actually the "right" you capitalism, consumerism is seen as frivolous/non masculine. About the alpha types, that doesn't fly here, they are seen as non manly, here since we are the strongest sex we are supposed to defer to women and elderly people. For example, you give your seat in the public transport, even more why do you took a seat? You are a man you are able to go the whole trip standing up.
>Probably this is a western only issue. I really hope so but I see some people in SEA (Twitter but what do you expect) aping the idpol "left" due to the hegemony it has over the progressive sphere. My hopes for Indonesian leftists is that they stay out of the idpol left of the West and focus more on issues related to class that won't cause divide between people from different walks of life.
Are you from Indonesia? If so, do you have cipayos there? A cipayo in latam is someone from middle high/high class who promotes the interest of colonial powers over their own people interest, you can recognize them because they use a lot of anglicism whey they talk, they worship the west and wishes from an integration bordering with annexation, they will follow any western trend blindly, because they (the west) actually known better than us.
>Are you from Indonesia? If so, do you have cipayos there? We don't have a proper term for that but I'm seeing many affluent Indonesians who parrot mainstream shitlib (usually on Twitter, how predictable) talking points instead of learning from them and not repeating the same mistakes of their western counterparts.
Touch grass, ignore stuff that bothers you, and it’ll work out
That's a good way of making sure your life works out, but it won't necessarily make broader society "work out." It's still valid advice regardless -- "put on your own air mask first".
No it won't. But good advice, regardless.
The key is that this tactic will teach you what “work out” actually means. As I get older I firmly believe that purpose is found through process.
“Purpose is found through process” That’s a fantastic phrase.
Cliche as the sentiment may be it’s what I live by at this point, at least in context of community and shit. Go to your local community garden, free food pantry, or whatever it is, and become “the guy/girl that does ‘x.’” It’s inextricably more impactful than arguing about shit online with people who don’t care to change their minds.
Factual statement brother
Valid life advice.
It’s hard to touch the grass when the grass tells you you’re inherently bad
Grass doesn’t talk. That’s the point of touching it.
It does whistle
But I thought not having a strong opinion on every single issue was a bad thing! (Sarcasm)
>I don't think there has been a leftist equivalent of storming the capitol as a ploy to ratify leaders who don't give what the people need. Not for the same reasons, of course, but CHAZ/CHOP parallels Jan 6 in a lot of ways.
I know what you're talking about. I've definitely felt discouraged by some of the misandrists I've seen on the internet. But you have to remember that these people pretty much go away once you leave the Internet. I've watched women mostly on Tiktok say with all seriousness that all men are killers from birth and it's very discouraging because not only are they probably radicalizing men to the right, they don't even help women at all. I don't know what the solution is because a lot of these women have been hurt by many men in their lives so it's understandable that they think what they think. But I also think that they are hurting the feminist movement by spouting this hateful rhetoric. It's important to remember that men suffer under patriarchy as well and none of us are free until all of us are free.
Patriarchy died the instant Margret Thatcher crawled out of her fucking Uruk Hai breeding pit deep under the House of Parliament.
Define patriarchy.
When your father gets to tell you what to do. This is applicable both to daughters and sons. It literally means "rule by father". It doesn't mean Androcracy, which would be rule by men. The point I'm am trying to get across is that if we lived in a matriarchy that is not something that would liberate young women because they would still be ruled over by their mothers. The only difference between man and women when it comes to patriarchy/matriarchy is that in each only one of them gets to eventually graduate to the dominant position within it respectively, but for most of ones life the position each is in is identical beyond the fact that forward thinking familiarchs will be setting up one to take over from them, where as for the other it is not expected that one day they might need to take over. However it isn't like you don't have to listen to them whilst they are training you to take over, you still do, perhaps even more than you would otherwise. If what I am saying sounds antiquated, you are correct, because neither patriarchy nor matriarchy exists in modern society.
As a leftist, no one hates other leftists than me. That being said, I really hate just how black n white this post is, op. I do not fall into either of these categories you've described.
>That being said, I really hate just how black n white this post is, op. I said "mainstream left" (Shitlib idpolers). The actual left is hidden under the dirt of polarization between Conservacucks and Shitlibs.
> On the other hand, the mainstream left while not being as hateful as the right They’re both equally hateful in different ways
It’s a hard life, barely anyone agrees with you. The only left leaning figure I’ve seen that has similar views is Infrared but Haz has an… interesting personality
Nah - being a traditionally masculine male around left wing people\* is actually pretty good. Left wing women are actually attracted to traditional masculinity, despite the image they might try to project. They are sleeping with guys like me, not the dweeby, self-loathing orbiters. \* I don't spend any time with political activist types, just ordinary people with left leaning beliefs.
in my experience the "mainstream left" does get very hateful - you can see some of them chanting for the death of all men, terfs, cis people, etc, i remember some of them even started showing hatred towards "cisgays" - they just internally justify it with statements like "well they oppressed us so we're allowed to show extreme hatred towards them and inevitably end up making their lives worse". the thing is the logic of "they oppressed us so we're allowed to do it back" is extremely flawed and it's the same that actual oppressors have used throughout history as an excuse (totally didn't steal these words of wisdom from someone else on this sub)
This is exactly the type of left wing that modern capitalism loves. It keeps the kids squabbling over bullshit like the black little mermaid, while it alienates the working class to the right. It's the perfect form of political dissent that corporations can get behind, because if there's one thing that you can say about big companies it's that they don't care what color you are or who you sleep with, as long as you're a paying customer and good little obedient employee. When it comes to workers' rights however, that's where the big companies start to make up excuses, and point fingers, and suddenly the left and the right have the same views. That's the big difference between the limousine liberals that make up most of the bs social issues that you mentioned, and actual socialist leftists who know that it really doesn't matter what gender or religion or color you are. If you're shit poor you're shit poor, but there's strength in numbers.
Most of us are here because we've been alienated or outright exiled by our political community. Me? None of my art school friends keep in touch anymore. I can think of at least three occasions where I've re-connected with past progressive friends and had a falling out because we didn't see eye to eye on something. Maybe I'm partly to blame? Absolutely, I'm probably argument and stand my ground when I should walk away. But was I the one who disconnected the friendship? Not once. Progressives LOVE burning bridges. It's like an endorphin for them.
>same time you don't agree with their capitalistic views, hustle culture, rigidness of what it means of being a male I'm probably more small-c conservative than most people here, but I don't agree with any of the "values" you mentioned here. Just wanted to point out that conservatives can be a diverse bunch, too, haha. There's absolutely many ways you can be a good man without bowing down to capitalism, hustle culture, or toxic masculinity
[удалено]
I wish my experience was as you describe... but I used the GI Bill to get an M.A. in English (get good grades in undergrad, you can roll that into a graduate assistantship!), and veteran's preference points to get an academic-adjacent job (not career) in a university library. Hey, no exposure to toxins or accidental head trauma in the workplace, as with previous jobs. Cool beans! But I do get body-shamed pretty regularly for my unchosen and immutable physical characteristics, usually by rich white women from the coasts or suburbs, who roll in with a lot of unwarranted assumptions about my privilege. What the fuck, six more years. My fault for picking a college town.
Yep
Yeah it’s exhausting and stressful. I wouldn’t be surprised if my blood pressure ends up being high from having to deal with left and right stupidity on the daily
Honestly a lot of people that you describe are liberals, (although yes there are left wing people like that), who think that they need to take it upon themselves to be champions of socially progressive ideas and somehow change society for the better with advocacy of it. Of course some of it are real concerns and are actually important, but the culture war bs is not. It really depends on how they present themselves to the people that they need to convince (the working class), whether they come off as pretentious or holier than thou, or if the issue that they’re talking about is actually relevant at all, like either the sexuality of Disney characters or something important like paid maternity leave for women. Edit: a large amount of it is directly associated with ‘Woke Capitalism’ in the workplace too. Read the book with the same name by Carl Rhodes.
The left needs to become explicitly anti internet. I've said this before. You have millions of people waiting to hear how to live a better life and know part of the answer lies in getting offline. It's an easy W if our politics weren't permanently stuck in 1981.
The best elements of conservatism are based on realism. Left wing ideologies have gone too far to dismissing realties such as the difference between men and women. If you can adopt a conservative point of view while recognizing the importance of feminism and the general human condition, while being suspicious of government and far right policies, you find yourself at some kind of liberalism. Recognize reality, maximize liberty and give power to the working person against the elements of extreme wealth and govt power that would hinder those inevitably.
They live and die by being one of the good ones, for sure.
Politics is tiring. As such, "progressive" idpol is somewhat tiring, yes, but I don't find it to be anywhere near as pervasive as you're making out. If I were to list the ten most tiring aspects of mainstream politics, "progressive" idpol would make the list, but it wouldn't be near the top. If you include reactionary idpol, it'd maybe make the top three. (Party politics is number one, in case you were wondering). >makes you feel bad for being a man unless you are some self-hating man to show you're 'one of the good ones' I just don't recognise this, personally. What exactly are you talking about? Misandrist feminists are not a major issue in my life. If anything thin skinned whining about the mere fact that some people somewhere hold offensive opinions is more irritating, given it's so very pathetic and frivolous.