With enough mental gymnastics and/or a complete disinterest in analyzing the way you see the world, it is absolutely possible to end up finding that sort of meme funny while also being against the right to abortion.
yeah good point, not everyone is thinking very hard about why they believe what they believe.
The idea that I’m referring to is basically that MRAs/pick-up artists and anti-abortion social conservatives are the same group of people with no meaningful distinctions between them.
An example of where I’ve seen this idea expressed:
You know those left-leaning meta subreddits like r/therightcantmeme and r/shitfascistssay that are largely about posting dumb right-wing stuff and then dogpiling on it together?
Earlier this year I saw a post (now deleted) on one of those subreddits where the content of the post was a manosphere-type meme that depicted a (attractive) man who got his (attractive) girlfriend pregnant and then, with help from his male friends, fled the country so that he wouldn’t have to pay child support. And the general tenor of the meme was supportive of this; basically the conceit was “being hot and scoring lots of noncommittal sex with hot women, without any concern for their well-being, is all that matters”.
Obviously this is an offensively terrible way to think about women, so the post got a lot of interaction and comments. But some of the comments caught my attention, because they tied in anti-abortion politics in a way that I think is kind of off the mark. One commenter said “The same guys who are anti abortion are the guys who laugh at stuff like this” and got a lot of upvotes.
I replied to them with something like “Huh? No, I don’t think that’s accurate. This is not a meme that anti-abortion social conservatives would find funny. This is a meme for ‘players’ who are misogynist in a lot of other ways, but generally support legal abortion.”
My comment got heavily downvoted. There were a couple of people who agreed with me and replied things like “lol you’re getting downvoted but you’re exactly right”, but those people got downvoted too.
Overall it seemed like the vast majority of people in that comment section disagreed with me, and believed that there really is no significant difference between anti-abortion Christian social conservatives and the MRA/PUA/Andrew Tate crowd.
I still think I'm right about this, though. What are your thoughts?
Lenin's Bourgeois and Proletarian Democracy
Huh, I've read some of Lenin's essays, but I didn't know about that one. Thanks for namedropping it.
The only situation in which democracy as a whole would be rejected under a Marxist program is when false consciousness is too powerful to overcome
that feels pretty instructive for the US, lol
Yeah I know who Moldbug is. I was giving him as an example of a belief that I don't agree with.
I think I understand the reactionary critique of democracy fairly well. It basically consists of the following:
- democracy is over-sanctified as a theoretical concept/ideal, and is a sham as it has actually been practiced
- It's impossible for large complex societies to be horizontally organized; they'll always be hierarchical, and the people at the top will never be entirely accountable to the people at the bottom. There will always be an elite.
- The reason that some countries are richer and more prosperous than others isn't because they're more democratic, it's because (a) they have better institutions regarding private property & rule of law, or (b) they just have more human capital
- some people are just morally/intellectually better than others and deserve to have more political power (e.g. right-wingers on Twitter, such as Matt Walsh, who say things like "you should have to pass a civics test in order to vote" or "voting should be restricted to people above a certain IQ/net worth")
However, I do not feel like I understand the Marxist critique of democracy very well. I know that leftist/Marxist skepticism of democracy (or at least liberal democracy) exists, but I don't really feel like I know what the full argument is. All I know currently is that I've observed internet leftists make various small individual assertions about democracy that, although I think they're mostly true, don't really come together to form a complete vision, and sometimes even contradict each other. These various assertions include the following:
- The US claims to be a democracy but is really more of an oligarchy
- the US was never a democracy
- bourgeois democracy can never be authentically democratic
- liberal democracy is really just colonial herrenvolk democracy and is too historically related to colonization to exist without it
- the bourgeois revolutions of the Enlightenment era were overrated
- democracy is kind of oversanctified and unachievable, and has really been turned into part of the liberal civic religion in Western countries; large societies are never really democratic (this is basically agreeing with the reactionary critique that I described above, at least parts of it)
- Democracy metrics/indices such as this one are basically just meaningless, contrived Western propaganda. It's impossible to know whether any country is really more democratic than any other one.
- China, Cuba, North Korea, Syria (maybe?), Russia (maybe?), and Iran (maybe?) are democratic, and so was the Soviet Union; they just have/had different democratic processes that seem strange and illegitimate to Westerners because of propaganda & cultural gaps.
I think all of the above are true or possibly true, but it seems unclear what's actually being argued for here. In particular, it seems like sometimes the argument being made is "democracy is good and worthwhile, but Western countries aren't really democratic", and other times the argument is "actually democracy is an illusion and not worth aspiring to in the first place".
I feel like I'm missing something here. Can anyone enlighten me? Is there a good text that makes this clear? (I'd prefer something short, like 2,000 words or so, but if you know a book that's relevant you can recommend that as well.)
Like yeah, we all know that communism defeated fascism in WWII, but that was only after a lot of war & genocide had already transpired.
I'm interested in the counterfactual, in which it never got to that point because the Nazis and Italian fascists were prevented from ever acquiring power to begin with. What would that have looked like? What would have been needed for that to happen?
Why she deserved to lose: Gaza genocide
Why she actually lost: voters inappropriately blaming democrats for the high inflation in 2021-2023
- (it wasn't really Biden's fault or the democrats' fault, it was a global issue and pretty much every country has dealt with high inflation in the last few years. The US's inflation has been about average internationally, maybe even a bit lower than average.)
Why this sucks:
- since Gaza protest voters weren't actually a difference maker, there's not as much opportunity for us to agitate about it as we would've liked. Liberals will probably be dismissive of the argument that Harris lost because of her position about Gaza, and they'll be right; it just doesn't really hold up.
- the liberal smugness about ignorant voters that we're surely going to see in the next few weeks is... actually kind of correct.
Let me know if you think I'm wrong about any of this. I'd kind of like to be wrong, honestly.
Yeah you're right. Furthermore, the graph that they show for "Did Joe Biden drop out" isn't even in absolute units, so we can't actually tell how many people are making this query. They normalize it so that the maximum is always represented by 100, but that still might only be like <1000 people.
Like what if I want help formulating counterarguments to liberal/conservative stuff that I see elsewhere, and/or I want to discuss leftist ideas/stances that feel to me like they're a bit weak and need shoring up, and/or I want to clarify/examine my own more problematic ideas?
I mean, I guess I could post to librehab, but I've already authored the most recent three posts there and I'm starting to feel like, you know, that guy.
So about the CW: this author is an Israeli neoreactionary, a "race realist", and a seeming Ashkenazi supremacist. I am not looking to downplay that, and I am posting this with some caution. (In particular, there is a racist barb in this article against Candace Owens and Kanye West.)
Having said that, they are also fairly knowledgeable about Jewish history, including Zionism, antisemitism, the Holocaust, etc. and as far as I can tell they are relatively intellectually honest about these things - certainly more intellectually honest than the Israeli goverment's propaganda vessels, or pro-Israel American politicians, etc. I'd be lying if I said I haven't learned anything from reading this guy's stuff.
In addition to the article linked above, they also wrote two follow-up posts:
Antisemitism as the Resting State of the Far Right
Wrapping things up on antisemitism
The last article, if you can look past the predictable communist-bashing stuff, includes a point that I think is fairly useful and important:
> There is a stupid belief common to both antisemites and the antisemitism industry, which is that America, and white countries in general, are always one step away from breaking out into antisemitism... In the 1930 Federal German election, the NSDAP won 107 out of 557 seats, so any German Jew under the impression that everything was hunky dory on the antisemitism front must have been on some pretty strong opium. More than that, though, there had been explicitly antisemitic parties, including ones that had antisemitism in their name, in the German parliament for 50 years. Hell, the German Conservative party officially included antisemitism in its electoral programme in 1892. The idea that one day ‘for no reason at all’ Germans became antisemitic and elected the Nazis has literally no basis in fact at all; it was the product of nearly a century of dedicated propaganda.
> This is the kind of stupidity that comes from seeing antisemitism as a ‘virus’ rather than an ideology. You could get a virus at any moment; you might get Covid tomorrow and be bedridden for literally minutes. Ideologies aren’t like that though. How likely is it that Libertarians will take over America three years from now? Not very, but they have had a party getting 2 or 3% in elections for decades and a whole nonprofit ecosystem promoting their beliefs. Do antisemites have that? So what are you even talking about?
Over the course of 5 days, La Repubblica reporter Francesca Borri, writing for Yedioth Ahronoth, met and spoke to Hamas's leader in the Gaza Strip, Yahya Sinwar. Sinwar stresses prisoner exchange is an important part of any agreement with Israel, claims he is not interested in more fighting, but 'it...
It's pretty interesting, and definitely useful for dispelling the common notion of him in the West as merely a crazy, violent, Jew-hating religious nutcase.
A lot of good stuff, but I'd say this is the money quote:
> What was [the occupation's] purpose? Raising killers? Have you watched the video where a soldier shoots at us as if we were bowling pins? And he laughs, laughs. They (the Jewish people) were people like Freud, Einstein, Kafka. Experts of maths and philosophy. Now they are experts of drones, of extrajudicial executions.
looks interesting. thanks
Thanks, this seems like exactly what I was looking for
This is really good, thanks
I have been semi-aware of the civil war and the attendant humanitarian crisis in Yemen for the last eight years or so, and I recall it being particularly bad in 2017 and 2018. However, I've never really understood what the actual contours of the conflict are. I don't know what the two opposing sides or ideologies are; in fact, I don't even know if there are just two. (I do know that the Houthis are one of the involved groups, but even there I don't really know what they're about, e.g. their vision and objectives; and the same goes for whomever they're fighting against.) I recall that a few years ago there was a lot of left discourse about how the (USA-supported) Saudi intervention in Yemen was bad, and I guess I'm willing to take other leftists' word on that, but I'd still like to understand why that intervention was bad.
I'm asking about this because I came across this post recently on Substack, in which the writer implies that the Saudi intervention in Yemen was done for good reasons and gets unfairly criticized. Now, that person is an odious Israeli racist, so I don't trust that their account of the situation in Yemen is particularly fair, but I do feel a bit stumped; I don't know much about Yemen, this guy seems to know more than I do, and I don't know what the counterargument is.
Is there a good article/explainer/blog that I could read about this?
If so, what did you think of it?
I'm curious about it, but I have too much other stuff I want to read first.
so this is it, right? We're, like, definitely in WW3 now?
been thinking about this a lot this morning.
I don't think the Nuremberg Trials really support your point here.
Admittedly I am not an expert about the Nuremberg trials, but based on what I know about them, they were not about simple revenge. They were mostly motivated by the following:
- appropriately prosecuting a bunch of German government officials for crimes against humanity that they clearly had committed
- establishing a precedent for a new system of international criminal law, since the events of the 1940s had proved it was clearly necessary to have such a system going forward
- to a lesser extent, educating the remaining German population and bringing some degree of shame on the remnants of German nationalism
- (I guess this last one could be possibly construed as 'revenge', but I wouldn't agree with that; I think there are important differences)
If you want an example of a court trial that was largely about revenge, I would encourage you to instead refer to the kidnapping and trial of Adolph Eichmann. However I don't think this example really helps your case either, because there actually were some problematic aspects to this trial, and it arguably did go too far, at least in the sense that (as Hannah Arendt argued) it was a gratuitous show trial that Israel didn't even have a right to conduct, given that Eichmann hadn't committed any crimes in Israel/Palestine. Really the Israeli government should have turned him over to the Hague.
settler-colonial worldview of statecraft
Can you elaborate on what you mean by this? I have a feeling that I probably subconsciously believe some of the concepts to which you are referring.
For instance, would you consider this to be an example of a "settler-colonial worldview of statecraft"?
What view of statecraft do you support as an alternative?
Indeed, by the time we get to today, it would turn out that having ancestors who fled from the same persecution is much less meaningful a similarity than what the people alive today actually make of that history.
Fair point
I was raised reform Jewish and am half Jewish by family history. I have ancestors who were victims of the pogroms in the Russian pale of settlement – specifically, all four of my great-grandparents on my father’s side, along with their parents (my great-great-grandparents). When they were children their families fled and eventually resettled in the USA.
There is another place that they could have gone instead: Palestine. At that time it was still part of the Ottoman Empire, and some of the displaced Jews of that time did elect to go to Palestine. As it happens, my ancestors chose the US, but they could have gone to Palestine if they’d wanted to.
The fashionable posture on the left to take towards Israeli Jews recently has basically been a combination of glibness and vitriolic hatred, often reaching the point of wishing death upon them (examples: 1 2). I don’t know… I just can’t really feel good about stuff like that. The fact that my family ended up in the US and not Palestine is really just a quirk of fate. I don’t think that my ancestors were, like, morally better people for choosing the US over Ottoman-era Palestine. (And given the recent uptick in “Turtle Island” discourse, it seems like a fair number of leftists believe my ancestors shouldn’t have been allowed to resettle in the US either.)
I think that Zionism (with the possible exception of cultural Zionism) has generally been a noxious idea throughout its history. I don’t think the state of Israel should continue to exist as it is currently constituted, and I think the near-ubiquitous racism among Israelis is shameful. But I also don't think that every Jewish person who moved to Palestine in the last 150 years was a bad person for doing that, and I’m not prepared to circle-jerk over the deaths of people that I have a fair amount in common with historically.
Am I missing something? Have I been hoodwinked by Zionist propaganda?
American's have to care for things to get better
This is probably far-fetched, but I'd like to think that Crooks was the first republican to actually be intellectually honest about Trump's connections to Jeffrey Epstein, and decided to take "kill your local pedophile" to its logical conclusion
this guy disagrees: https://x.com/prem_thakker/status/1812366460955562225
ST. PAUL, MN—Wondering how anyone could read the articles in such publications and not recognize them as “total establishment propaganda,” local man Mark Furlong, a longtime reader of Lib-Slaves.info, told reporters Monday he was sick and tired of the obvious mainstream biases on news sites like Wid...
https://www.jta.org/archive/ben-gurion-reveals-suggestion-of-north-vietnams-communist-leader https://www.jta.org/2014/11/02/culture/from-the-archive-israels-friend-in-hanoi https://richardpollock.substack.com/p/two-unlikely-national-liberation (pro-Israel blog)
This seems kind of disappointing.
I too am an anti-AIPAC progressive. I beg us to please stop whining and learn from this shit
Yeah I've been having similar thoughts.
2014-2020 or so was a period of significant ideological change & realignment in the US in a number of ways, but now things have kind of reached a new equilibrium, so the current ideological terrain is probably what we're going to have for a while. I think this is mostly because the internet & social media reached maximum penetration around 2014, and the 2014-2020 period was just the US's ideological terrain adjusting to that step change.
(Admittedly, I also might be biased because 2014-2020 is also basically the period when I was 18-25 years old, so of course it seemed to me like a lot of things were in flux)
I watched the video, and honestly that was a pretty mild example compared to previous things that Israelis have said about Hitler.
I will never forget this incident from 2019 in which Giora Radler, a Rabbi at a military prep academy in the occupied West Bank, was caught on a secret recording saying the following:
The Holocaust for real is not about the killing of Jews – that’s not the Holocaust. All of these excuses claiming that it was based on ideology or that it was systematic, this is ridiculous. Because it was based on ideology, to a certain extent, makes it more moral than if people murdered people for no reason. Humanism, all the secular culture about us believing in the human, that’s the Holocaust. The Holocaust, for real, is being pluralist, believing in “I believe in the human”. That’s what’s called a Holocaust. The Lord (blessed be his name) is already shouting for many years that the [Jewish] exile is over, but people don’t listen to him, and that is their disease, a disease which needs to be cured by the Holocaust.
He also said separately:
Hitler is the most righteous person. Of course he is right in every word he utters. In his ideology he is right. There is a male world which fights, which deals with honor and the brotherhood of soldiers. And there is the soft, ethical feminine world [which speaks of] ‘turning the other cheek’. Nazis believe that the Jews carry on this heritage, trying, in our words, to spoil the whole of humanity, and that’s why they are the real enemy. Now, he [Hitler] is 100% correct, aside from the fact that he was on the wrong side.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KwNnyRJnnIQ
https://mondoweiss.net/2019/04/israeli-military-praising/
My parents have had a terrible marriage for basically as long as I can remember. I have been anticipating their divorce on some level since I was about 11 (I'm now in my late 20s), and I don't know why they don't just pull the plug. In fact, I don't even know why they got married in the first place; they don't enjoy each other's company, they don't have congruent ideas or tastes on basically anything, they're basically incompatible in every way.
I think they both would have been better off if they had split up early, never gotten married and never had children together. They should have married different people, or just not gotten married at all.
The obvious implication of this, of course, is that I shouldn't have been born. This does cause me some existential discomfort. Thoughts occur to me like, "Why do I care so much about the future? Why do I pay so much attention to politics? What's the point of advocating for socialism or trying to work towards a better future? I don't have kids, I can't have kids\*, I don't think I should have kids, and I don't even think my parents should have had me. In a better timeline, I wouldn't even be here anyway."
\*(I had a vasectomy a few years ago)
I would like to feel a bit more assured about all of this. What do you think?
lmfao I didn’t even know that half of it
In their perception, Britain turned against the Zionists around 1939 or so (White paper) and sided with the Arabs in opposing a Jewish state after that. So they mean “Independence” as independence from Britain.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_insurgency_in_Mandatory_Palestine
"we'll never be able to accomplish fascism in the US because our base of suburban Fox News watchers are stupid and incurious about political theory" is a pretty amusing premise
Free Palestine
(Bum-Bum-Bum)
From the river to the sea
THE SEA
THE SEA
ba-da-ba-da-ba
I have seen some leftists stand by this statement as entirely true, and I have also seen some leftists dismiss this idea as cope on the part of liberal Zionists who dislike Netanyahu/Likud (and who would like to delegitimize both Likud and Hamas together).
The following are some relevant articles that support this idea:
https://www.timesofisrael.com/for-years-netanyahu-propped-up-hamas-now-its-blown-up-in-our-faces/amp/
https://theintercept.com/2018/02/19/hamas-israel-palestine-conflict/
https://www.thenation.com/article/world/why-netanyahu-bolstered-hamas/
What is clear is that Israel has allowed Qatar to fund Hamas on numerous occasions without much interference. However, whether Israel has ever actually funded Hamas specifically with Israeli money is not as well-established (although many of the people who support the general “Israel propped up Hamas” idea definitely imply that this has happened). So as a corollary question, how important of a difference is this?