that's not what we're talking about though. of course general full liberation, whatever we mean by that, will require intersectionality. my point is that do you think it's actually worthwhile to discount every single person who has an uneducated and reactionary take that they spend very little time engaging with or defending? we're not talking about a politician, or even a regular garden variety everyday transphobe reactionary. we're talking about someone who has dedicated their entire life to trying to advocate for the specific and immediate case of palestinian emancipation. so we're not talking about hypotheticals or building a communist movement in any particular place. we're just talking about whether or not one should simply mentally dispose of the usefulness of norm finklestein despite his track record on the political situation of occupied Palestine.
Can I ask why you're going to such great lengths to defend someone you have admitted yourself is a transphobe? Can you ask yourself why you thinking defending a transphobe is something that's somehow valuable to leftism?
I'm defending an academic who got kicked out of academia for crossing Alan Dershowitz, an academic that has spent the majority of his time getting literally slandered, libeled, and sued for defending Palestinians. So I'm not defending his transphobia, I'm saying that his transphobia is an extreme L on his part that is bad for his own cause. But I don't want to kill the man, and I think we have to consider him a genuine ally on the topic of Palestine. I'm not saying that all allies are allies on everything. Norm isn't even a communist. But he's also as old as my grandparents and didn't drop his transphobia until he already had dementia. So I hope I answered your question in good faith, I'll ask again, why do you think it's productive to hate this old man for not being based on everything? I agree that he shouldn't have said that shit. My grandma shouldn't tell me that i'll be mistaken for a girl for my long hair because that's regressive and limited. For some reason though, I care a lot more about my grandma's inability to have a meaningful material impact on my life and her life getting beaten by an alcoholic husband and that she has dementia. My point is that you seem to have this attitude that anyone that isn't perfectly progressive on all identifiable issues is equally monstrous, and that itself is insane protestant type brainworms. it would be like saying should get the wall for his history of opposing LGBTQ+ liberation in Cuba for many decades. can you ask yourself whether that's a reasonable standard for viewing people as valuable to leftism? i mean fidel even had a much larger impact on actual people because he wasn't just an academic on an unrelated issue saying some hateful shit in his old age. he was the leader of the cuban revolutionary and his opinions impacted policy, impacted actual people's lives for the worse.
yeah, i think holding up any single person for being good is stupid moralizing. we have because we like his takes on dead nazis, not because literally everything he did was good and based. marx himself had plenty of reactionary ideas, obviously we all tend to find his work useful and moving regardless.
Stalin wasn't making videos about "gooning" in 2023, but yeah let's go ahead and hold them to the same standard because historical context isn't a thing.
Finkelstein has the time and energy to learn about and care about gooning enough to talk about it but doesn't have the time and energy to learn about and care about trans rights, and y'all are defending him like he's some liberation hero. Pretty fucked up
My dude, Finkelstein is an academic. He's supposed to have good takes relative to the general population and relative to non-academic radicals. Like, that's literally the role academics are supposed to play. "But Castro was homophobic!" Castro was too busy leading an army of militants that overthrew a comprador regime to be completely up to date on queer liberation. He's allowed to have a few bad takes here and there since he didn't sit on his ass all day reading books. And you quite conveniently left out the part where Castro did self-crit in front of the Cuban people for being a homophobic shithead and rightfully so. Where are we gonna see Finkelstein's self-crit for being a raging transphobic piece of shit? Castro had to lead a nation facing a genocidal blockage, but still found the time to realize he made a grave mistake. What's Finkelstein's excuse?
I mean, that's essentially the grounds on which i'm defending him in general. just that he's consistently been one of the lonest and loudest voices on are particularly important topic that's currently gotten heated up to active genocide again. he's also an old old man who's brain is melting. what i think is that no one should let him be near a camera again in his life because he said that dumb transphobic shit. also yeah, agreed on castro. i think castro improved himself greatly, especially on this issue, and i think it would have been the obvious counter to my point to mention that he was sort of busy not reading and actually dealing with shit. i understand that. but my general point is just that no one is orthodoxically perfect, and it's odd to expect a dying old man to put it together. like this post in general, do people think norm is encountering the term "gooner" while browsing the internet? it should be upsetting to people that someone taught him this word. that's essentially my only take i'm trying to have. that he's an old old man who probably doesnt deserve "the wall" for something he said after his brain started melting from his fucking ears. it's like parenti having had bad takes on the same in my opinion. if norm finklestein shows up saying transphobic slurs at my friends, i'll beat his wrinkly ass. but that's really just not what's going on in my opinion. i hope this doesn't come across as combative, i'm really just trying to sincerely talk about where the line should get drawn on how we think about certain people. maybe norm has been way more out and about on this than i think he was, and i'm basking in my own ignorance. i also recall he wrote a very stupid book about cancel culture, and it was something no one should have let someone in his condition write. but i'm not trying to put him on the pedestal, i'm not saying he shouldn't be consistently and regularly rebuked for his very bad takes. it just seems distracting to me considering the ongoing genocide at hand.
I know I said this elsewhere in the thread but I think your defense of him and his awful views based on your beliefs about his mental health, and scapegoating his caretakers or whoever, on this is ridiculous. Nobody is making him speak; he did not have to speak purely on the basis that someone "taught" him about trans people.
Also the point about "it just seems very distracting" reads as pure cringe to me. Nobody is discounting rhe work he's done advocating for ending the gennocide in Palestine... As if we cannot discuss both and defending the right of trans comrades to exist is somehow "distracting", I think I've heard that kind of rhetoric elsewhere.
I'll ask again, why do you think it's productive to hate this old man for not being based on everything?
Probably because I care a lot about my trans comrades and anyone who isn't their ally isn't mine either. It's a shame you don't, apparently. Intersectionality isn't that complicated and yet you are just rabidly defending a transphobe because he apparently has some good ideas on a topic that you care about more than trans rights
You are the only one coming off as rabid here. It's entirely possible to have a good faith conversation about this. Your interlocutor appears to be attempting that, and you're coming off as entirely hostile from the offset and unwilling to engage with the responses.
Yeah sorry that I'm not being civil about defending my right to exist and the rights of many of my comrades and loved ones to exist. That's pretty low of me isn't it.
Oh wait, no, that's wrong. I'm not sorry at all. I'll never apologize for defending the rights of my loved ones to exist. Ever.
For real, "you're coming off as entirely hostile from the offset and unwilling to engage with the responses", about whether or not you should be soft on this guy who thinks you should not exist. Calling you rabid about it. Not a very good look for them.
yeah this is not a useful attitude for leftists, friend. I care a lot about my trans comrades and I'm trying to stay polite when being accused of not. i hate transphobia and most transphobes, and most of all our society that materializes that social hatred against trans people. but please, for the love of god, try to be a better materialist about this. norm finklestein has had a meaningful material impact on people in favor of not supporting the genocide of palestinians. surely it's possible to understand the good he's done, the bad he's done, and the overall complexity of the person in question. are you trying to have a good faith discussion, or just attempting to make personal attacks? i want to make very clear, this man is not my hero, and i don't have personal heroes. i just reject the idea that you should discount literally everyone if they aren't a fully intersectional force for good. i recognize the vast amount of good he's done advocating for palestinians and the relatively small amount of damage he's done to trans people.
Just to be really really clear though:
Asserting that I care more about Palestinians than trans people is 1) a disgusting equivocation of two mostly unrelated movements for liberation and 2) almost a cruelly unserious thing to throw out there while over 10,000 Palestinians, half children, have been ethnically cleansed in the last month. We are literally only having this discussion because Norm is in the news advocating for a ceasefire and rights for Palestinians.
To put it in your style:
Palestinian freedom isn't that complicated and yet you're rabidly attacking a Palestinian advocate because apparently he had some bad ideas on a topic you care more about than the ongoing active bombing of a population center that is more dense than fucking Tokyo
I don't think that's reasonable, but it seems like that's how you're comfortable having a conversation with your comrades
Yeah uh, you aren't my friend, or my comrade. You're defending a transphobe and I don't have any friends or comrades that would ever do that. I'm disengaging with you, go shout your transphobic screed into some other void but don't shit up my feed with it anymore.
yes, i'm being condescending to a person that is more interested in policing the good from the bad than looking at the good and bad things that are done.
you clearly don't see yourself as infamousbit's comrade, or them as yours, you shouldn't use the word so fucking lightly
well i'm clearly not cut out to be their comrade. seriously, this is an online shitposting and discussion board, none of this is praxis, none of us are actual comrades to each other except for the support and thoughts we can give via words, and the occasional mutualaid post. are you seriously suggesting we should sacralize the word "comrade?" this isn't a fucking religion, a comrade is a person that does stuff with you to support liberation from capital. that's a silly perspective to have about the use of a word. in mandarin, comrade is just the generic name for a lgbtq person. is that using it too lightly for your taste? what makes it ok to say we're comrades?
are you seriously suggesting we should sacralize the word "comrade?"
i am saying i vehemently dislike the way you shroud yourself in words and constantly and consistently take the least charitable interpretation of your opponent. i am saying i dislike the way you write a paragraph of ideas and assumptions you have about the person you are arguing with. i am saying i distrust you, especially when you use the word comrade like your opponent is intended to be hurt by your grace.
this isn't my opponent, i am being sincere except for the line that was obviously sarcastic. i would generally think of people on here as being comrades, but choosing to get combative about norm finklestein of all fucking people is beyond the pale after you've watched a genocide unfold for a month straight. i'm not attempting to be uncharitable, i am making a case that their attitude is generally unhelpful for a leftist political project.
i am saying i vehemently dislike the way you shroud yourself in words and constantly and consistently take the least charitable interpretation of your opponent. i am saying i dislike the way you write a paragraph of ideas and assumptions you have about the person you are arguing with. i am saying i distrust you, especially when you use the word comrade like your opponent is intended to be hurt by your grace.
i am saying i dislike the way you write a paragraph of ideas and assumptions you have about the person you are arguing with
i am describing the person's rhetoric as i see it, sincerely. do you think that subtext doesn't exist or something? i am trying to be sincere and clear, and thus writing paragraphs. infamousbit has been rude and condescending and short. I answer their questions, they don't answer mine. I answer your questions, you don't answer mine. I think people here are generally comrades. I don't think infamousbit should talk to me like that so I inverted their take back to them. I really fail to understand why you think that's worse somehow than them having nothing to offer but attacks on my person.
if i had better self control, or didn't think you were probably well-intentioned in general, i'd have told both of you all to fuck off ages ago
i am saying i vehemently dislike the way you shroud yourself in words and constantly and consistently take the least charitable interpretation of your opponent. i am saying i dislike the way you write a paragraph of ideas and assumptions you have about the person you are arguing with. i am saying i distrust you, especially when you use the word comrade like your opponent is intended to be hurt by your grace.
you are treading on thin ice. this is really close to saying "i think you want to kill the man." the vibe this gives makes me distrust your perspective. nobody has said anything remotely close to "let's kill norm finklestein for his transphobia"
My point is that you seem to have this attitude that anyone that isn't perfectly progressive on all identifiable issues is equally monstrous
infamousbit hasn't said enough words to you for you to get this precise of a read on their 'attitude'. you're fabricating a portion of this whether you realize it or not
and that itself is insane protestant type brainworms
this is a big reach and does not help your image
it would be like saying castro should get the wall
again, you are fabricating a huge portion of this. nobody here is saying anything like this.
this is really close to saying "i think you want to kill the man." the vibe this gives makes me distrust your perspective
what do you think the poster saying norm gets the wall means? i mean, i'm willing to admit that perhaps i'm too autistic to see it as a bit when I read it, but...? yes? they do seem to think a good revolution would kill the man?
does not help your image
i am an anonymous poster online, not a content creator, i genuinely don't know what kind of image you think i do or don't have, or do or don't care about.
i think infamousbits attitude is generally defeatist and unhelpful and i'm trying to push back against that. i don't think it's a reach to say that "Norm Finklestein "gets the wall"" for having a bad take on something he knows nothing about and to most observers simply looked very foolish and uneducated is a regressive take by a person that does not seriously think it is possible to build a social movement for liberation. you can't just prereject everyone that doesn't already agree with you as deserving of being shot. I struggle with internal doomerism too, but I'm intellectually aware that you don't build a movement if you think you fundamentally can't reach or even engage with people that do not yet have intersectional attitudes.
i'm trying to say that if infamousbit was just making an offhanded joke and i took it too seriously, that's possible because sometimes i do that. uh thank you though, for being real ableist about it. guess you get the wall with me too now
I think liberation without intersectionality is impossible, yes
that's not what we're talking about though. of course general full liberation, whatever we mean by that, will require intersectionality. my point is that do you think it's actually worthwhile to discount every single person who has an uneducated and reactionary take that they spend very little time engaging with or defending? we're not talking about a politician, or even a regular garden variety everyday transphobe reactionary. we're talking about someone who has dedicated their entire life to trying to advocate for the specific and immediate case of palestinian emancipation. so we're not talking about hypotheticals or building a communist movement in any particular place. we're just talking about whether or not one should simply mentally dispose of the usefulness of norm finklestein despite his track record on the political situation of occupied Palestine.
Can I ask why you're going to such great lengths to defend someone you have admitted yourself is a transphobe? Can you ask yourself why you thinking defending a transphobe is something that's somehow valuable to leftism?
CW: Mention of Domestic Violence
I'm defending an academic who got kicked out of academia for crossing Alan Dershowitz, an academic that has spent the majority of his time getting literally slandered, libeled, and sued for defending Palestinians. So I'm not defending his transphobia, I'm saying that his transphobia is an extreme L on his part that is bad for his own cause. But I don't want to kill the man, and I think we have to consider him a genuine ally on the topic of Palestine. I'm not saying that all allies are allies on everything. Norm isn't even a communist. But he's also as old as my grandparents and didn't drop his transphobia until he already had dementia. So I hope I answered your question in good faith, I'll ask again, why do you think it's productive to hate this old man for not being based on everything? I agree that he shouldn't have said that shit. My grandma shouldn't tell me that i'll be mistaken for a girl for my long hair because that's regressive and limited. For some reason though, I care a lot more about my grandma's inability to have a meaningful material impact on my life and her life getting beaten by an alcoholic husband and that she has dementia. My point is that you seem to have this attitude that anyone that isn't perfectly progressive on all identifiable issues is equally monstrous, and that itself is insane protestant type brainworms. it would be like saying
should get the wall for his history of opposing LGBTQ+ liberation in Cuba for many decades. can you ask yourself whether that's a reasonable standard for viewing people as valuable to leftism? i mean fidel even had a much larger impact on actual people because he wasn't just an academic on an unrelated issue saying some hateful shit in his old age. he was the leader of the cuban revolutionary and his opinions impacted policy, impacted actual people's lives for the worse.
Didn’t Stalin have bad takes on it too?
Let’s throw out the bath water with the whatever.
yeah, i think holding up any single person for being good is stupid moralizing. we have
because we like his takes on dead nazis, not because literally everything he did was good and based. marx himself had plenty of reactionary ideas, obviously we all tend to find his work useful and moving regardless.
Stalin wasn't making videos about "gooning" in 2023, but yeah let's go ahead and hold them to the same standard because historical context isn't a thing.
Finkelstein has the time and energy to learn about and care about gooning enough to talk about it but doesn't have the time and energy to learn about and care about trans rights, and y'all are defending him like he's some liberation hero. Pretty fucked up
Well, you're obviously beyond reproach.
Almost like we contain multitudes. Except for you, natch.
I just wonder why you and others in this thread are SO PROUD to be defending a literal transphobe. Very strange stuff.
Stalin also led a war machine that buried millions of fascists. He's allowed to have bad takes.
My dude, Finkelstein is an academic. He's supposed to have good takes relative to the general population and relative to non-academic radicals. Like, that's literally the role academics are supposed to play. "But Castro was homophobic!" Castro was too busy leading an army of militants that overthrew a comprador regime to be completely up to date on queer liberation. He's allowed to have a few bad takes here and there since he didn't sit on his ass all day reading books. And you quite conveniently left out the part where Castro did self-crit in front of the Cuban people for being a homophobic shithead and rightfully so. Where are we gonna see Finkelstein's self-crit for being a raging transphobic piece of shit? Castro had to lead a nation facing a genocidal blockage, but still found the time to realize he made a grave mistake. What's Finkelstein's excuse?
I mean, that's essentially the grounds on which i'm defending him in general. just that he's consistently been one of the lonest and loudest voices on are particularly important topic that's currently gotten heated up to active genocide again. he's also an old old man who's brain is melting. what i think is that no one should let him be near a camera again in his life because he said that dumb transphobic shit. also yeah, agreed on castro. i think castro improved himself greatly, especially on this issue, and i think it would have been the obvious counter to my point to mention that he was sort of busy not reading and actually dealing with shit. i understand that. but my general point is just that no one is orthodoxically perfect, and it's odd to expect a dying old man to put it together. like this post in general, do people think norm is encountering the term "gooner" while browsing the internet? it should be upsetting to people that someone taught him this word. that's essentially my only take i'm trying to have. that he's an old old man who probably doesnt deserve "the wall" for something he said after his brain started melting from his fucking ears. it's like parenti having had bad takes on the same in my opinion. if norm finklestein shows up saying transphobic slurs at my friends, i'll beat his wrinkly ass. but that's really just not what's going on in my opinion. i hope this doesn't come across as combative, i'm really just trying to sincerely talk about where the line should get drawn on how we think about certain people. maybe norm has been way more out and about on this than i think he was, and i'm basking in my own ignorance. i also recall he wrote a very stupid book about cancel culture, and it was something no one should have let someone in his condition write. but i'm not trying to put him on the pedestal, i'm not saying he shouldn't be consistently and regularly rebuked for his very bad takes. it just seems distracting to me considering the ongoing genocide at hand.
I know I said this elsewhere in the thread but I think your defense of him and his awful views based on your beliefs about his mental health, and scapegoating his caretakers or whoever, on this is ridiculous. Nobody is making him speak; he did not have to speak purely on the basis that someone "taught" him about trans people.
Also the point about "it just seems very distracting" reads as pure cringe to me. Nobody is discounting rhe work he's done advocating for ending the gennocide in Palestine... As if we cannot discuss both and defending the right of trans comrades to exist is somehow "distracting", I think I've heard that kind of rhetoric elsewhere.
when dementia becomes curable?
Probably because I care a lot about my trans comrades and anyone who isn't their ally isn't mine either. It's a shame you don't, apparently. Intersectionality isn't that complicated and yet you are just rabidly defending a transphobe because he apparently has some good ideas on a topic that you care about more than trans rights
You are the only one coming off as rabid here. It's entirely possible to have a good faith conversation about this. Your interlocutor appears to be attempting that, and you're coming off as entirely hostile from the offset and unwilling to engage with the responses.
Yeah sorry that I'm not being civil about defending my right to exist and the rights of many of my comrades and loved ones to exist. That's pretty low of me isn't it.
Oh wait, no, that's wrong. I'm not sorry at all. I'll never apologize for defending the rights of my loved ones to exist. Ever.
For real, "you're coming off as entirely hostile from the offset and unwilling to engage with the responses", about whether or not you should be soft on this guy who thinks you should not exist. Calling you rabid about it. Not a very good look for them.
yeah this is not a useful attitude for leftists, friend. I care a lot about my trans comrades and I'm trying to stay polite when being accused of not. i hate transphobia and most transphobes, and most of all our society that materializes that social hatred against trans people. but please, for the love of god, try to be a better materialist about this. norm finklestein has had a meaningful material impact on people in favor of not supporting the genocide of palestinians. surely it's possible to understand the good he's done, the bad he's done, and the overall complexity of the person in question. are you trying to have a good faith discussion, or just attempting to make personal attacks? i want to make very clear, this man is not my hero, and i don't have personal heroes. i just reject the idea that you should discount literally everyone if they aren't a fully intersectional force for good. i recognize the vast amount of good he's done advocating for palestinians and the relatively small amount of damage he's done to trans people.
Just to be really really clear though:
Asserting that I care more about Palestinians than trans people is 1) a disgusting equivocation of two mostly unrelated movements for liberation and 2) almost a cruelly unserious thing to throw out there while over 10,000 Palestinians, half children, have been ethnically cleansed in the last month. We are literally only having this discussion because Norm is in the news advocating for a ceasefire and rights for Palestinians.
To put it in your style:
Palestinian freedom isn't that complicated and yet you're rabidly attacking a Palestinian advocate because apparently he had some bad ideas on a topic you care more about than the ongoing active bombing of a population center that is more dense than fucking Tokyo
I don't think that's reasonable, but it seems like that's how you're comfortable having a conversation with your comrades
Yeah uh, you aren't my friend, or my comrade. You're defending a transphobe and I don't have any friends or comrades that would ever do that. I'm disengaging with you, go shout your transphobic screed into some other void but don't shit up my feed with it anymore.
this is dripping with condescension. you are not being as steady-handed with this as you think
you clearly don't see yourself as infamousbit's comrade, or them as yours, you shouldn't use the word so fucking lightly
yes, i'm being condescending to a person that is more interested in policing the good from the bad than looking at the good and bad things that are done.
well i'm clearly not cut out to be their comrade. seriously, this is an online shitposting and discussion board, none of this is praxis, none of us are actual comrades to each other except for the support and thoughts we can give via words, and the occasional mutualaid post. are you seriously suggesting we should sacralize the word "comrade?" this isn't a fucking religion, a comrade is a person that does stuff with you to support liberation from capital. that's a silly perspective to have about the use of a word. in mandarin, comrade is just the generic name for a lgbtq person. is that using it too lightly for your taste? what makes it ok to say we're comrades?
i am saying i vehemently dislike the way you shroud yourself in words and constantly and consistently take the least charitable interpretation of your opponent. i am saying i dislike the way you write a paragraph of ideas and assumptions you have about the person you are arguing with. i am saying i distrust you, especially when you use the word comrade like your opponent is intended to be hurt by your grace.
this isn't my opponent, i am being sincere except for the line that was obviously sarcastic. i would generally think of people on here as being comrades, but choosing to get combative about norm finklestein of all fucking people is beyond the pale after you've watched a genocide unfold for a month straight. i'm not attempting to be uncharitable, i am making a case that their attitude is generally unhelpful for a leftist political project.
i am describing the person's rhetoric as i see it, sincerely. do you think that subtext doesn't exist or something? i am trying to be sincere and clear, and thus writing paragraphs. infamousbit has been rude and condescending and short. I answer their questions, they don't answer mine. I answer your questions, you don't answer mine. I think people here are generally comrades. I don't think infamousbit should talk to me like that so I inverted their take back to them. I really fail to understand why you think that's worse somehow than them having nothing to offer but attacks on my person.
if i had better self control, or didn't think you were probably well-intentioned in general, i'd have told both of you all to fuck off ages ago
this is all you are gonna get. stop talking to me
Removed by mod
"How dare you fucking call me 'comrade' when...
... checks notes...
... I have that listed as my preferred pronoun in my profile?"
I read this whole thread with that thought tumbling around in the back of my brain. Absolutely wild.
you are treading on thin ice. this is really close to saying "i think you want to kill the man." the vibe this gives makes me distrust your perspective. nobody has said anything remotely close to "let's kill norm finklestein for his transphobia"
infamousbit hasn't said enough words to you for you to get this precise of a read on their 'attitude'. you're fabricating a portion of this whether you realize it or not
this is a big reach and does not help your image
again, you are fabricating a huge portion of this. nobody here is saying anything like this.
what do you think the poster saying norm gets the wall means? i mean, i'm willing to admit that perhaps i'm too autistic to see it as a bit when I read it, but...? yes? they do seem to think a good revolution would kill the man?
i am an anonymous poster online, not a content creator, i genuinely don't know what kind of image you think i do or don't have, or do or don't care about.
i think infamousbits attitude is generally defeatist and unhelpful and i'm trying to push back against that. i don't think it's a reach to say that "Norm Finklestein "gets the wall"" for having a bad take on something he knows nothing about and to most observers simply looked very foolish and uneducated is a regressive take by a person that does not seriously think it is possible to build a social movement for liberation. you can't just prereject everyone that doesn't already agree with you as deserving of being shot. I struggle with internal doomerism too, but I'm intellectually aware that you don't build a movement if you think you fundamentally can't reach or even engage with people that do not yet have intersectional attitudes.
deleted by creator
i'm trying to say that if infamousbit was just making an offhanded joke and i took it too seriously, that's possible because sometimes i do that. uh thank you though, for being real ableist about it. guess you get the wall with me too now