I was vocal and terrified about climate change in the 90s (although I didn't do a whole lot). I was super active in the anti war stuff during the war on terror. I said repeatedly that Iraq had no WMDs and that Afghanistan wouldn't go well. I was sorta active during Occupy. I was telling everyone not to buy crypto years ago. And I've been very COVID outspoken from day one.
This post is not to brag about how based I am. I was very slow to get on the correct side of trans issues, and I've said/done enough borderline racist and misogynistic shit. I have enough cringe memories of me being a lib. I've also just been really lazy and selfish.
Anyhow, I had hoped that the right would be so wrong, so badly, that people would wake up and warm to our side. I used to actually do organised debates with different groups at uni. I even sent a few a FB message years after Iraq went to shit (ya I'm petty). None have been like "oh fuck, you were so right want the WMDs". When I'm battling friends over COVID issues or the newest bullshit trans conspiracy theory, THEY FUCKING KNOW I was right about crypto and Elon Musk. It's like, all the Ls that the right had taken are in the memory hole and we're onto the next bullshit idea. I'm still the lone crank that's warning about war with Russia and China and telling everyone to mask when my mates were smoking weed through every horrible murderous mistake the West made.
Sorry if it sounds like I'm whinging for my own sake. I get that the right is very well funded, and that is no individual's fault. I'm just very aware that people around me find me to be a tedious crank, but they're all fucking liberals who've been eating out of the trashcan of ideology their whole lives.
Sometimes the libs will coopt the left position and retroactively pretend it was the lib position the entire time (most dramatic example that comes to mind: the Civil Rights Movement) and that's the best you can hope for.
You can also see it in how fast Liberals starting claiming credit for gay marriage after a decades long struggle by LGBT activists did the hard work of making it broadly popular, and even then they relied on a court ruling that made the issue moot. A little over a decade ago (when gay marriage was seen as politically toxic) Obama, Clinton and the rest were all signing laws stating that marriage was exclusively between a man and a woman.
Now LGBT rights discourse are being used as a cudgel against state enemies while one of America's ruling parties is attempting as much social murder against trans people as they can get away with, and Liberals are doing virtually nothing in response.
Gay marriage was only banned once on the federal level in entire US history. It was done by Clinton and Biden & co.
They can also do it while its still happening, like when they coopted BLM and then removed it from the public discourse
I don't even remember quite where they were during the 2020 uprisings, i just remember that they used "defund the police" as a cudgel for all of 2021.
During the uprisings, they were busy doing performance art and watering down "abolish the police" to "defund the police" which they would then go on to say is too extreme.
Unless I'm mistaken, all we'll need is 5,000 scary guys marching in the street who have a much more extreme stance on landlords than Mao did.
Liberals are centrists, and centrism is a conservative ideology. They're not victims of brainwashing, they're passively benefitting from right wing politics. Liberals reject progressive ideas until they're mainstream- not because they're stupid, but because it pokes holes in their inflated sense of safety and superiority.
To actually change a liberal's mind is to punch through the realm of the theoretical and force them into the here and now. A liberal only stays liberal for as long as they don't have to choose between socialism or barbarism, the waveform has to collapse at some point. Schrodinger's Lib, you could call it.
Was one of the Chapo hosts who said most peoples ideologies are confusing nonsense, right?
I think most people don't see this in terms of grappling with their own set of beliefs here, because they don't really have any? That's not to say they don't believe in some sort of "human rights" or "making the world a better place" or whatever, but there's just nothing behind it.
When crypto was gonna make the world better, they were for that. When it didn't, I'm not for it anymore, because I'm pro making the world a better place. The rest is then just going with the flow uncritically.
Yeah. The classic example is when anyone does canvasing for anything political and when people start talking about their beliefs it's a goulash of esoteric nazism, maoism, scientology, star wars, prosperity gospel, and god knows what else. Absolutely, utterly incoherent and unexamined.
People in general rarely do this. More commonly, they disagree with you, think it over, and change their minds on their own terms. Very rarely will anyone give you the full satisfaction of admitting they were wrong, you should always expect rationalizations and justifications. If you don't expect that, then expect to be disappointed.
I share your frustration. I don't have any advice other than to keep approaching folks in good faith (which is sounds like you are doing). It can be really tough for folks to pinpoint when or how their ideology shifts, and it can be even harder to bring ourselves to admit that we were effectively failed by ourselves in the past, when we held those beliefs despite the evidence that should have swayed us being available. Just keep at em! You never know what kinds of awesome seeds you might be planting even if you can't see the growth.
Communism will win. :party-parenti:
Tell me about it.
I have also made mistakes as a Marxist. For awhile I thought Biden was going to lose the election, even as it looked like Trump was flailing (more than usual). Then I realized that Biden's victory would be the funniest result, which is often how national politics works in the USA. Another major mistake I made was listening to Radio War Nerd with regard to the Ukraine War. They maintained so hard that Putin would never be foolish enough to invade. While I recognize that their podcast is extremely entertaining and informative, I couldn't listen to them after that. In their defense, AFAIK the only people saying that Putin was going to invade were the motherfuckers in the state department who haven't told the truth about anything since the day they were conceived.
The thing I've realized is that when you argue with libs, you aren't actually arguing with them, in a way. You're arguing with the entire edifice of capitalism. This is why they all make the same arguments and all sound like the same person (except for the more notable weirdos). I almost believe that they'll talk about "human nature" if they've never even heard this term before. Similarly, when they argue with us, we all sound like zombies to them, because they are arguing with the edifice of Marxism. We've talked a lot about how we were radicalized, whether we were born or were made like this, but a lot of us have "inciting events" in our lives that shake us out of our liberal stupor (since we established long ago on hexbear that most of us were formerly libs). For me, liberals kept fucking me so hard over and over again, I just couldn't stand them anymore, especially because I knew from experience that what they said was nonsense. I discovered r/chapotraphouse, started reading theory, and here I am.
I also don't think it's a waste of time to talk with libs, however. The potential is there. They really, truly do not know what they are talking about, because if they did, they would be Marxists (just as is the case with regard to creationists and Darwin, for instance). This means that any discussion of the Soviet Union (for example) will quickly show that they are out of their league. Although almost every discussion with liberals goes nowhere, I do have to say that there were moments earlier in my life when someone might have been able to radicalize liberal me, and my knowledge of Marxism might have been able to save people who perished because they didn't understand that there was a way out that did not involve killing themselves.
Ohh I said that Russia wouldn't invade all the way up to the end. So that's an L for me. But honestly making predictions on world events isn't the same as judging obvious imperialism in one's own country.
I try talking to libs. But sometimes I just need to let things go as I'm too damn tired to argue with them about something they won't change on.
Ohh I said that Russia wouldn’t invade all the way up to the end. So that’s an L for me. But honestly making predictions on world events isn’t the same as judging obvious imperialism in one’s own country.
Assuming Russia wouldn't invade was genuinely the smarter bet, even though it ultimately ended up being wrong. All the actual facts looked like the usual wargame dickwaving every major power does, while the people insisting an invasion was imminent had been doing so for years and have literally never been correct/told the truth about anything else.
That's true.
I started getting suspicious at the evacuation of Donetsk about a week before the war actually started. It seemed like a huge reaction to a state of war that's been basically stuck in the status quo for years.
Before that, I assumed the Status Quo would continue.
Iirc correctly everyone on hexbear, including me, was saying Putin wouldn't invade and was just flexing. It seems like fait accompli in hindsight but almost everyone was genuinely shocked. In retrospect we now know that Ukraine was gearing up to invade Donbass in what would probably have turned in to ethnic cleansing/genocide, but at the time it was much less clear how strongly the war was an ethnic civil war and how deeply the nazi influence ran in the government and military.
I am a lib, and will certainly die a lib. That said:
The afghanistan war is this for me. Something like 88% of the country supported that invasion, anyone who spoke out about it was blacklisted. It took a lot of convincing to pull my own mind away from genocide. Good luck finding anyone who will admit to it now, 88% of the country up and vanished without a single news report.
but they’re all fucking liberals who’ve been eating out of the trashcan of ideology their whole lives.
It's this, and you can't let it get to you. They're advertised to daily, the world shaped to accommodate them, etc. - these tools are used because they work and present an appealing alternative to... well reality.
Sorry people are a pain in the ass.
Afghanistan
I think you mean Iraq if ur talking USA attitudes. Does anyone even know why everyone invaded Afghanistan too? (Even the countries who clearly weren't excited about Iraq but still sent soldiers there)
The media machine in :kkkanada: is still giving us stories about how bad the Taliban are and how bad it is that we're not there anymore because women can't go to school anymore. No news about how bad living conditions are because they don't have access to accounts from the last government. Or critical examination of what exactly was being done for 20 years and why the Taliban won immediately once foreign invaders left.
I honestly do not know the rationale for the Afghanistan invasion, and why they're not allowed to be a socially backwards allied country like Qatar or Saudi Arabia instead of a socially backwards pariah. I get the whole 911 thing, but still doesn't make sense. Why spend all that money for 0 influence 20 years later?
I meant Afghanistan, here's one poll;
https://news.gallup.com/poll/5029/eight-americans-support-ground-war-afghanistan.aspx
The why is fairly complex, but there was pre-existing intent to start wars with what ultimately became the "axis of evil." 911 was simply used to make it happen.
Why Americans permitted it? We didn't know Iraq from Afghanistan, and didn't care. A common term at the time was "glass the middle east with nukes."
I meant genocidal when I said it.
I'm surprised people in US even remember Afghanistan. That seemed like such a side thing to Iraq.
But I guess the question is phrased as "were we right to invade brown country" instead of "name the countries that we were correct to invade". I feel like no one American even talks about Afghanistan because the reasoning was slightly less flimsy than Iraq.
You're right, they don't remember Afghanistan and it really fucks with me. The shit we did there is horrific and I walk amongst war criminals.
Yeah, i was saying glass the desert for a while back then. I was in highschool in 2001 and didn't know anything about anything. It was such a bizarre, scary time culturally. Just the worst fascist impulses on full display, not that it ever got better.
As far as i understand and remember bin Laden was in Affghanistan, the US demanded the Taliban surrender him, the Taliban offered to hand him to a third party for trial, the US said fuck you and sent in specops, the US was allied with the northern alliance warlords, the northern alliance started losing, we sent in troops to support them, and since bush and cheney didn't really have a plan or care it just kind of snowballed. Bin Laden had left for Pakistan before we even got their so it was pointless from the start, and from what military people have told me there was never a clear goal or objective the whole twenty years we were there. It was just a combination of failson governance and profiteering.
I'm pretty sure i supported iraq and afghanistan at the time. I was a teenager and didn't know anything. This is probably the most cliche "performative leftist man" thing ever but i think what started to break me out of it was this girl i was dating asked me to march in Pride with her and it turned out we were the anti-war anti-bush contingent. It was shortly after the abu ghraib pictures came out and i ended up walking several miles through downtown wearing a prisoner jumpsuit and a black hood with my hands chained up. I don't know if that was actually "the moment" America started breaking down for me, but it's the moment i remember.
Most people don't seem to think very critically or do deep examinations of their own memories, or ever doubt how they remember things in the first place
They operate on vibes, and then only pay attention to vibes they like. Bad vibes? Those bother me so I won't think about injustice or anything. Nothing will pierce my bubble:blob-no-thoughts:
My theory is it's an ego defense mechanism. Changing your worldview is painful. It's difficult. It takes incredibly hard work that nobody else can see, and political radicalization is a quick way to lose friends if you're vocal about it.
They choose an easier path. One that denigrates their humanity, sure, but unarguably easier.
Being a lib is like being in a long hallway that irradiates you a little bit every second, but you don't notice. If you assume it's a normal hallway built and maintained by people who have your best interests at heart, the logical thing is to just walk down it.
Why are these paranoid disorderly radicals bloodying their hands trying to smash the windows? Don't they realize there's a path right here?
Having bipolar disorder and the weird memory lapses and distortions that accompany sever depression, along with some introductory psych classes, totally changed how i consider my memory. I regard it as being stories i tell myself about my past, with no real way to be sure what was true or what was distorted. I especially try not to make assumptions on what i knew or how i felt at the time since reflection and changes that happened long after will get painted back in to memories.
I was just ambivalent about it, and I didn't allow myself enough exposure with trans people and issues. I definitely said plenty of transphobic shit in the naughts and maybe a bit in the 10s. Honestly the original r/CTH subreddit really helped me grow in this area. And literally thank God because my best friend came out as trans like six months later.
Sorry to drop that comment in there. I just wanted to be careful that this post wasn't a brag post.
As a trans woman, i'm actually glad when people are honest about this. Back when i was younger and in hardcore denial mode, i've said some really vile transphobic things myself, it's sadly normal in a society that is structurally exterminating us. Western society is built to break and brainwash anybody who falls outside of cisnormativity to this day, legal and healthcare systems are actively set up to torture us, ultra-transphobic shlock like Silence of the Lambs and Psycho that is honestly on par with nazi propaganda films like Jud Süß in how viciously and completely it demonizes its subjects is regarded as classic kino to this day, it's not surprising at all that people had to work through a ton of brainworks during the last years and that many still aren't fully there.
Edit: What i'm getting at is, i vastly prefer that honesty over the liberal hypocrisy of painting themselves as those big LGBT rights advocates when their support is still worth fucking nothing when push comes to shove.
We want people to learn and change and recognize when they were shitty in the past. You don't want to be too credulous, but you also want there to be a path where people can do better and their past shortcomings aren't held against them in perpetuity.
I have to hard disagree here and i'd also like to mention (without accusing you of anything, ofc) that transphobes routinely use "the killer isn't actually trans, it says so right in the film" as an excuse to shield these films from accusations of transphobia and to engage with the harmful, actively damaging concepts they've inject into the public subconscious over the decades. I see Psycho as clearly transphobic even if we view Bates as a cismale crossdresser. I don't share that view, we almost exclusively see the character from the perspective of an outside observer, narrated in a way that is oblivious to authentic trans experiences and it's impossible to judge against that background if the story is about a man wearing drag or about an egg confining her true self to crossdressing episodes that she can seperate from her everyday male gender performance to maintain a self image compatible with Amerikan mid-century society. But that is irrelevant to the films transphobia. What makes Psycho so dangerously transphobic is how it deals with the validity of trans identities: Having a psychiatrist barge in at the end and declare that the murderer was "not a REAL transsexual" without ever having talked to Bates is purest transmedicalism and standard for films centered around killers violating gender norms. You see the exact same "not a REAL transsexual" expert statement in Silence of the Lambs and in Dressed to Kill (i think the Cormoran novels by J.K. Rowling do the same with their killers, but i'll never read anything of that madwoman's drivel again). And it is the very core of these works' transphobia to deny the identity of the killers. I don't care if a film portrays a trans woman as a serial killer if she's an authentic portrayal of a heckin valid trans girl doing trans things, except she just happens to have a basement full of terf meat she serves as a caterer at Republican party conventions. Honestly, i'd watch the shit out of that if it was narrated from a trans perspective. Being accepted means we do not need to be exempted from being the villains in movies, everybody loves a good villain. No, what makes me view these films as the prime example of trans-exterminatory propaganda is that we get gender-nonconforming killers and they are always framed as being "not actually trans" because to the transphobe, trans people aren't real. The killers are therefore misgendered and deadnamed throughout the film to the point that we do not even get to learn their chosen names, or get to know anything about their gender identity from their own perspective. We only see through the eyes of Buffalo Deadname when she has her nightvision goggles on and tries to murder Agent Starling or when she threatens to use the hose again. We only see through the eyes of Bates when Bates is using the peepholes and stabbing the victim. Their own perspectives are used exclusively for vojeuristic violence against cis women. Anything else about their entire existence is reduced to the outside perspective, which is a cissie imagination of what it's like when somebody "is faking transness". How can anything be more transphobic than that?
I am so, so down for trans sweney todd.
I didn't view Silence as transphobic, not because the movie isn't transphobic, but because i had so little concept of transgender identities the last time i saw it that i never made the connection until you brought it up. It seems obvious in retrospect, but at the time i was just too ignorant to even realize that Buffalo Bill was supposed to slander a whole class of people.
I didn't notice it back then, either, but i'm fairly sure that seeing movies like that as a kid played at least some part in my repressing my transness for decades.
¿Por qué no los dos? Would the audience have been as unsettled, or seen the killer as quite so transgressive, if the Mother character had instead been a Father? Even if the film isn't explicitly anti–trans, it still relies on transphobia brought to the film by the audience for at least some of its shock value.
most liberals won't go leftist until they actually experience some of the horrors of capitalism. my best friend since childhood used to be somewhat chuddy liberal. i radicalized in high school/college and he ended up radicalizing a year or two ago after he had some health issues and really felt his soul get crushed by his old job. i spent years and years explaining to him how capitalism fucks you. and i think when he got sick and his medical bills were piling up he was able to recognize how he was getting fucked? and now he's a leftist who texts me about how much he wants to guillotine rich people. i guess the point that i'm trying to make is that (as someone said below) you want to plant seeds so that when conditions do get worse for the people around you they can recognize why.
This is an important realization. Thank you for sharing. Hopefully keeping this in mind can make us less annoying by moderating our expectations.
Perhaps you and the libs in your life were both "right" in different ways. No, I'm not going for the pun. You were correct in your assessment of phenomena you listed in this post, but the libs were also correct in a certain sense. By holding opposing views on these things they were able to lead safer, easier lives than if they had agreed with you. If that's wrong, then why bother being right?
It sounds like your post itself disproves your hypothesis. You, a lib, admit you were wrong amor multiple things
Sometimes you gotta just ignore what libs say (or what they don't say), take the :fidel-cool: -pill, and remind yourself that history will absolve you
