And also please tell me what right wing coalition is going to support health care, a living wage, and union organizing

I cannot believe people with this much experience can fall for libertarian platitude and Marjorie Taylor Greene tweets and decide that the "left" needs to form a coalition with the :live-tucker-reaction: resistance front

also

cw misogyny anti woman

Jackson Hinkle one of these people who would clearly be a part of this "left right coalition" said

Haz, chimes in: there are a lot of fat women on codepink. Hinkle: yes they’re ugly

among other things after she dipped out of the "antiwar conference" these people are not your friends and not even your short term allies.

the highest liked response to this tweet is from the LaRouche senate candidate :data-laughing:

  • Awoo [she/her]
    ·
    2 years ago

    The only way this would work out for the left is by allowing the right to pour millions of dollars into such a coalition and then having all the right wing organisers killed off in a left wing night of the long knives to leave behind only the left as an organisational force but the infrastructure of the coalition that the right spent their millions building.

    Given that I don't think there's anyone in the left right now with the balls or organisation to take this approach I don't think any such coalition would work out. Better to do it separately.

    • AssortedBiscuits [they/them]
      ·
      2 years ago

      I mean, that how's a united front is supposed to work. The immediate objective is to tactically unite with orgs of conflicting ideologies in order to pursue a common goal. The more long-term strategic objective is to poach members from the orgs into your own org and snuff out those who refuse to get with the program.

  • P1d40n3 [he/him]
    ·
    2 years ago

    Every time I start to like reading an author's work, they go full...this...one ya. fml, lmao, etc

  • MaoistLandlord [he/him]
    ·
    2 years ago

    why couldn’t be reveal himself to be a dumbass before I bought a $5 book of his

    • Nagarjuna [he/him]
      ·
      2 years ago

      Lol. The important thing in unions is that the left controls them. The right doesn't care as long as the wage increases keep coming. I'm not sure how you could make that work work in an anti war coalition, especially when I'm not convinced the right actually believes it.

      • HoChiMaxh [he/him]
        ·
        2 years ago

        The left doesn't control like, a ton of unions. The point is you can form unity with people you disagree with to achieve a goal that you do agree with. Not only that, but in the process you can bring people together and build solidarity that can extend outside of that union.

        Just saying "not my comrade" about everybody to the right of Hexbear dot net is fundamentally demobilizing.

        • Nagarjuna [he/him]
          ·
          2 years ago

          Yeah, but the left generally (like, social democrats) represents the majority of unionized workers through SEIU, NEA, CWA and progressive locals of other unions.

          My point was that leadership of diverse coalitions is important.

        • blobjim [he/him]
          ·
          2 years ago

          I guess the question is, "do right-wingers oppose US wars because they are opposed to western imperialism?" It just feels hard to believe they are. It feels more like right-wingers trying to graft themselves onto what has historically been a left-wing movement, in order to neuter it. Feels hard to turn being against war into something off-putting to regular people, but people like Hinkle could do it.

  • Rojo27 [he/him]
    ·
    2 years ago

    Spent too much time around Jimmy Dore I guess.

    • LeninWalksTheWorld [any]
      ·
      2 years ago

      You can tell because people like them still think "the left" is something that exists in America and it's not just powerless individuals vibing on the internet. You can't control something that has no organization

  • Evilphd666 [he/him, comrade/them]
    ·
    edit-2
    2 years ago

    Ok rant time. It's a bit big so I'm going to bracket it with spoilers as not to take a whole page of scrolling.

    https://consortiumnews.com/2023/02/14/chris-hedges-building-a-left-right-coalition-against-war/

    I respect Hedges, but this is a point I have disagreement with him. It isn't with a coalition, but I don't think he's taking in the whole picture and taking a bit one sided simplistic view.

    It isn't just protesting war for protesting war's sake. It is not taking in the root causes and whole picture of what is going on with the country (the western world really now). Not learning lessons from the past. Being a bit one sided, maybe a bit short sighted. A coalition needs to understand each other. It also needs to have respect especially when one part is actively trying to erase and genocide the other part, and that's precicely from not learning the lessons of the past.

    spoiler

    All Hedges grandstanding about not canceling only to cancel the "woke left" as a pejorative. He bit the :live-tucker-reaction: too much and commits a friendly fire. I think it shows a lack of understanding from his part, and I mean this all with respect to Hedges and the work he's done.

    After how much the term "woke" is used primarily as a fascist umbrella scapegoat term today i.e. :frothingfash: [CW: queerphobia] Ron DeSatan and entire state parties declaring queers a direct threat to women and children to justify fascist laws, he enables fascists using the term as an attack vector. Like no one really uses the term 'woke' on [THE LEFT].

    I get temporary allies nuclear war outside comfort zone blah blah urgency, but when Hedges attacks some segments of left for not wanting to stand next to their oppressors pushing for laws making their existence illegal or actively grifting by speading lies and innuendo like Libs of Tik Tok , he displays ignorance of the situation.

    We are in the middle of the 3rd Red Scare :kremlins: - he must know and understand that by now. We are also in the middle of the 2nd Lavender Scare to compliment it, ironically boosted by these so-called MAGA "Communists". This isn't just a simple disagreement like universal healthcare vs public option here. This is actively smearing the queers as an easy scapegoat under the umbrella [WOKE] term.

    He quotes Nader

    This refusal, he says, fosters political paralysis, not unlike the paralysis in the face of Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s witch hunts in the 1950s against supposed Communists.

    .....

    Then Heges himself

    But the left, mesmerized by a self-defeating boutique activism, also pays a price. As the empire unravels, the woke left, demanding moral absolutism, marginalizes and discredits itself at a moment of crisis. This myopia is a gift to the oligarchs, militarists and Christian fascists we must defeat.

    Has the Lavender Scare been memory holed by these elder Leftists? Perhaps they aren't paying enough attention to those they are allying in and don't realize the extent that these so called temporary allies are virtue signaling con artist grifters of the things he wants to fight.

    Hedges seems to miss the point of WHY the leadership and investor class they are protesting is doing this war. - it is because peace wasn't keeping the line going up as fast. It was still making them money. It still had them on the Forbes list. But the line stopped going up as much. What stood in the way? The peace and weapons treaties. [wayback because CNN memory holed it] :trump-moist: tore up on the orders of Bolton and their major bribers, Renaissance Technologies.

    Protest war but you need to understand the root cause. That all goes back to :smedly-exhausted: war is a racket.

    You need to protest the racket and the tools of that racket as much or more than you need to protest the war and the nasty apocalyptic situation it's leading us to. The tools of the racket is what is oppressing us, piting us against each other, and part of the laundry list of common grievances that we should be able to address to our government.

    The establishment / State uses the tools of a Red Scare and Lavender Scare to achieve the threat or percieved threat 🎈 to manufacture consent (another lesson that also seems lost in the sauce here) to placate the population into extorting their tax dollars so :stonks-up: go up faster. Often at the cost of wages, benifets, and social services and infrastructure. Austerity.

    The real irony of this all is while those on the :libertarian-approaching: and :frothingfash: right speaking against the war get Red Baited as agents of Russia or China the same as [THE LEFT]. THIS should be a uniting force. Nothing builds teams like common suffering.

    The slandering of [THE LEFT] as pedophiles or idpol or cancel culture or [WOKE] is used by them to contibute to the Lavender Scare component of the 3rd Red Scare and try to cancel people not simply from social media, but from life and civilization itself. It feeds the Christo-fascists.

    A nation under threat or percieved threat will clamp down on liberties and use religious dogma to stir hyper nationalism. That was played out quite nicely in Game of Thrones. We're seeing that on both sides of the war in Ukraine as well. Ukraine banning the Church of England Russian Orthodox lol and Russia leaning into it.

    Hedges wants to cry about moral absolutism when those he's allying with is advocating for State Sanctioned moral absolutism and witch hunts. (Red and Lavender Scares)

    Hedges goes to make the "lives are on the line put the petty differences aside" (paraphrasing) when these supposed petty differences are exactly the lives being threatened here at home by those he's temporarily allying with.

    For as much as Hedges wants to say come together and build a coalition, why is it always [THE LEFT] that has to constantly make concessions or get berated or told to pocket greivances or look the other way?

    I get allies for a common cause yadda yadda, but there seems to be a lack of understanding and remembering history as we are most definitely repeating it. A naivete, or short sightedness from those he is allying with making the complaints about why some on [THE LEFT] don't want to have a photo op publicity stunt in DC with those actively trying to erase them from life.


  • M68040 [they/them]
    ·
    2 years ago

    I'm sorry but if it's the right or the deep state or whatever, i'm all in on the deep state. Even if they're not the really cool version the right constantly bitch about.

    • zifnab25 [he/him, any]
      ·
      2 years ago

      Its a riddle of coalition building you can't escape by just pointing at a side and saying "I like them better." Because institutional Deep State agents and bureaucrats can't be on your side. They don't get where they are by being free-agents nor are they particularly receptive to outside views. At best, you can be on their side when they consider you useful. More likely, you're just rooting for your favorite baseball team without actually doing anything of substance.

      If you want to be an activist, you're going to have to interface with lots of other people who have their own personalities and views. And plenty of those people are going to be difficult to work with, either because they've got reactionary views or obnoxious personalities or because they're flakes. So when you find someone who is as enthusiastic about a thing - say, obstructing the federal government in prosecuting a war abroad - and they're not flakes and they're not totally obnoxious to be around, how willing are you to disassociate from them because they've got Ron Paul bumper stickers or Andrew Sullivan in their news feed?

      Idk. Its easy to do nothing all day and tell yourself "I'd never work with someone on the right!" quietly, alone, while staring at a computer screen at 2 am.

      It's less easy to spend hours or days or weeks or months or years trolling around town looking for an organization to which you can apply some kind of useful and productive effort, then hit on a group where you genuinely feel you're making productive use of your time, and finally - after having invested substantive portions of your sweet and tears into a project - walk away because someone else says something noxious.

      On the flip side, if you're just on your grift game, right-wing money spends as good as anyone else's. So if you're a Keffles or a Matt Taibi and you've got bills to pay, maybe you take the Daily Wire money and pretend you're just reaching a wider audience. Again, Idk. I'm nowhere near as influential as Matt Taibi, so I doubt I'll ever have to make that kind of choice.

      But there's a reason right-left relationships form. Its not just everyone on the Left being closet Fash or sell-outs or whatever.

      • M68040 [they/them]
        ·
        edit-2
        2 years ago

        Yeah, the core of my politics is not liking the right (particularly libertarians) and i don't really like people that much in general anymore so i'm not really the coalition building type. Plain'd rather choose failure on my terms than success contingent on tolerating the idiots with gadsen flag bumper stickers.

        • zifnab25 [he/him, any]
          ·
          2 years ago

          the core of my politics is not liking the right

          I get that. But I'm down in Texas. If I didn't like the right, I'd have a hard time liking a whole lot of people.

          Plain’d rather choose failure on my terms than success contingent on tolerating the idiots with gadsen flag bumper stickers.

          There are a lot of people who share our grievances, but have internalized a completely different set of causes.

          There are a lot worse things you can have on your car than the Garden Flag. Cop plates, for instance.

  • invo_rt [he/him]
    ·
    2 years ago

    Hedges using "the woke left" as a pejorative. :lenin-sure: