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RagnarokAngel posted:You're kind of an idiot if you don't see the significant value in social and legal acceptance and how much they intertwine. It's pretty easy to see the value of social and legal acceptance when it comes with a big fat bill. Regardless of any theoretical differences (there are many) the principle complaint of activists with marriage equality is the people who prevailed on that line did so by doing what bourgeois parasites do best: hoovering up every last dollar of support in battleground states while the old networks of outreach, health services, and advocacy groups withered and died. People standing in the smoldering crater left behind by marriage equality know exactly what "social acceptance" buys them. That's why its utter non-sense to talk about whether leftists err in privileging class as the central issue as if its an actual question and whether those sneaky reds will make good on their equality promises when the revolution comes or whatever. Class already is the central issue. It was money, power, and influence that decided the platform upon which queer politics would proceed in the wake of the AIDS crisis, not only over the objections of groups and individual activists who had a much more radical and egalitarian agenda in mind but also largely at their expense. People who are engaged in and badly losing an all out war for survival at the level of housing, healthcare, and poverty continue to see zero support from activist networks mobilized in support of marriage equality. They're doing what you're doing: wondering when it's going to be their turn. In a way its sort of chilling to hear OwlFancier talk like these political movements were the picture of broad-based solidarity among disparate groups that Marxists could learn a thing or two from. I can show you were the bodies are buried if you want but what it really boils down to is that this perception of unity along various identitarian lines that transcend class is just the worst kind of slippery liberal triumphalist bullshit.
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Sep 24, 2016 17:47
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I don't really disagree with you, spotlessd, but you're an rear end in a top hat. While you have a somewhat nuanced argument, the fact of the matter is that when someone (queer, non-white, female, etc) hears the ubiquitous leftist complaint that "identity politics are a distraction" what you're communicating to them is generally the same thing as the "all lives matter" dumbfucks. It's not redbaiting to say that standing on the sidelines complaining about people trying to survive capitalist is useless cynicism. Politics is often about self-interest (including leftist class politics!) and the left is just straight up not offering a viable alternative right now. As piecemeal and insufficient as this reform bullshit is, it's demonstratively improving lives. I helped at occupy, before it was utterly crushed in my city. It was lovely and ineffectual too. If the revolution manages to come, I'll be on the street to throw bricks, but that's not where we are as a society right now. Unless you're sociopathic enough to be an accelerationist, your time would be better done working on building solidarity and reforming the system until you can actually reach some sort of tipping point.
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Sep 24, 2016 18:16
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*sigh* someone help me out here. He's saying that big money interests push gay marriage as an issue to distract from the REAL issues plaguing the LGBT community, meanwhile no one cares about housing and employment discrimination? If so. What the gently caress are you talking about? It's not like the Human Rights Campaign just packed up shop after last year. They are still around. LGBT activists are still around, fighting for these things.
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Sep 24, 2016 18:23
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spotlessd posted:It's pretty easy to see the value of social and legal acceptance when it comes with a big fat bill. Regardless of any theoretical differences (there are many) the principle complaint of activists with marriage equality is the people who prevailed on that line did so by doing what bourgeois parasites do best: hoovering up every last dollar of support in battleground states while the old networks of outreach, health services, and advocacy groups withered and died. People standing in the smoldering crater left behind by marriage equality know exactly what "social acceptance" buys them. 
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Sep 24, 2016 18:27
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Reminder that voting for Hillary Clinton this fall is more important than ~*~ideological purity~*~. http://www.pinknews.co.uk/2016/09/2...f8e470556fe0b22
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Sep 24, 2016 18:28
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Nostalgia4Infinity posted:Reminder that voting for Hillary Clinton this fall is more important than ~*~ideological purity~*~. Wasn't Trump supposed to draw conservative LGBT voters to the GOP or some other bullshit?
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Sep 24, 2016 18:41
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Anyway, it's not a surprise that people see the democrats as being a preferable outcome when their opponents are promising to increase our suffering rather than merely maintain it.
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Sep 24, 2016 18:43
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BigRed0427 posted:*sigh* someone help me out here. He's saying that big money interests push gay marriage as an issue to distract from the REAL issues plaguing the LGBT community, meanwhile no one cares about housing and employment discrimination? As far as I can tell? Which, I mean, I would argue even if it were true that people concerned with economic equality could still stand to learn a thing or to about cohesive organizing from that? Unless the suggestion is that the advances in LGBT acceptance of the past few decades haven't actually been as a result of LGBT persons' efforts and actually are just Capital deciding to create a smokescreen of social change on this particular issue for... some reason. In which case gently caress off. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 18:47 on Sep 24, 2016 |
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Sep 24, 2016 18:43
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iospace posted:Oh yeah, I know, but right now millennials are the "Big Prize" according to every pundit who has an opinion on the voting blocs this year. If you can swing them over to your side /and/ get them to vote, you win. The problem is right now they're waffling, because A. Bernie IS THE BEST, and B. The bigger problem is that an awful lot of millennials are deeply disillusioned with politics in general. I'm a millennial and I'm voting for Hillary, but there are profound institutional and systemic problems with the American government and no president is capable of fixing them. Rightly or wrongly, Hillary is seen as a deeply establishment candidate and a lot of millennials hate the establishment more than they care for any particular ideology, leading to the popularity of perceived outsiders like Trump, Sanders, Stein, and Johnson with millennials. For good and for ill, the blunt message of "poo poo in Washington DC is hosed, guys" is one that resonates very strongly with the millennial generation.
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Sep 24, 2016 18:48
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Octatonic posted:I don't really disagree with you, spotlessd, but you're an rear end in a top hat. While you have a somewhat nuanced argument, the fact of the matter is that when someone (queer, non-white, female, etc) hears the ubiquitous leftist complaint that "identity politics are a distraction" what you're communicating to them is generally the same thing as the "all lives matter" dumbfucks. It's not redbaiting to say that standing on the sidelines complaining about people trying to survive capitalist is useless cynicism. Politics is often about self-interest (including leftist class politics!) and the left is just straight up not offering a viable alternative right now. As piecemeal and insufficient as this reform bullshit is, it's demonstratively improving lives. You're not hearing me at all. "The left" is not some separate bloc of narrow interests and it isn't anywhere near the sidelines. To the extent it exists at all, it is largely within and among communities whose politics are organized around issues of equality, and for obvious reasons. Identity politics is a separate issue from assimilationist politics, although developments in the latter certainly highlight dysfunctions in the former. But in both cases the most thorough and biting critiques came from inside the house, from people who felt rightly feel stepped on by bourgeois mismanagement and sublimation of community activism. These were movements in which those same critics were thoroughly and personally invested and not anything like "bystanders". I'm beginning to think most of you just straight up don't know what the gently caress you're talking about when you use words like "left" and "Marxist" in a sentence, because it certainly sounds like you're getting your theory and history third-hand from other clueless people like the one who wrote that article (especially when you say things like "leftist class politics are about self-interest").
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Sep 24, 2016 19:23
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BigRed0427 posted:*sigh* someone help me out here. He's saying that big money interests push gay marriage as an issue to distract from the REAL issues plaguing the LGBT community, meanwhile no one cares about housing and employment discrimination? I think that the cogent part of the argument is more "marriage equality" is easier to sell and raise money for, because it helps middle class and rich gays, who have some degree of access to power, and not just the (disproportionately LGBT) poor, and working on housing and employment discrimination should be a higher priority, as it effects a broader group of people who are more in need. I agree that the HRC and such are still around, but "employment nondiscrimination" is just not as sexy, to pardon the phrase, and there isn't the same amount of energy working toward it, and we can't afford to wait for the consensus to build again. But, if spotlessd is as young as a lot of the rest of us in this thread, I imagine that he only saw the tail end of the push for marriage equality, when things had already reached a fever pitch. (also ignoring that iirc the push for marriage equality was started in the wake of the AIDS crisis because of little things like "health insurance" and "being able to see your partner in the hospital" and "not dying alone".) Fundamentally, though, the problem with reform is that it's slow, incomplete, and vulnerable to reaction. Selling something like civil rights or women's liberation or gay rights as a fight to reform the system makes it pretty easy to say "hey look the law has passed, problem solved, we can all go home now". This line of complaint is about the (legitimate) fear or frustration that the momentum has all been spent on something incomplete and insufficient to really solve the problem. None of us want to be hearing "you can get married now, homophobia is over" years down the line, and effectively have to to do it all over again, like what's happening with Black Lives Matter and police reform. And I think all of us ITT share this fear, but we filter it through different ideologies. I think ardently supporting the Democrats of the Republicans is very much a reaction to the same fear. Whether or not that's pragmatic or a product of false consciousness is I'm sure open for a very tedious debate that I don't really care to have.
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Sep 24, 2016 19:26
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Octatonic posted:(also ignoring that iirc the push for marriage equality was started in the wake of the AIDS crisis because of little things like "health insurance" and "being able to see your partner in the hospital" and "not dying alone".) This is exactly the poo poo I'm on about. Conservatives were saying "AIDS is a plague sent by God to punish perverts" and liberals said "Yep! And the cure for their disgusting sexual hedonism is wholesome, tv-friendly state-sanctioned monogamy", so how did the leftists who were saying "uhhhh how about just healthcare" become the bad guy? I mean just consider for a moment that visitation rules didn't actually apply to the parking lots and homeless shelters that came to be the death bed of many AIDS victims and you'll begin to see the line between left and gay disintegrate. You're right about marriage equality coming in the wake of the AIDS crisis but utterly wrong about the details. The communities hit hardest by the epidemic also produced the most vocal and radical left critics of marriage equality, not merely as a question of priorities but grounded in fundamental opposition to the same liberal institutions that locked the doors and barred the gates when the full weight of the crisis became apparent. The only people who didn't think that marriage equality was a loving absurd response to the violence and degradation that followed the epidemic were the affluent and opportunistic parasites that had other reasons to favor a more normative platform. Marxism provides a much better explanation as to how they won that particular argument than liberal Right Side of History progressivism, I promise you that.
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Sep 24, 2016 19:47
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lol
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Sep 24, 2016 19:49
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spotlessd posted:This is exactly the poo poo I'm on about. Conservatives were saying "AIDS is a plague sent by God to punish perverts" and liberals said "Yep! And the cure for their disgusting sexual hedonism is wholesome, tv-friendly state-sanctioned monogamy", so how did the leftists who were saying "uhhhh how about just healthcare" become the bad guy?
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Sep 24, 2016 20:01
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spotlessd posted:I mean just consider for a moment that visitation rules didn't actually apply to the parking lots and homeless shelters that came to be the death bed of many AIDS victims and you'll begin to see the line between left and gay disintegrate.
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Sep 24, 2016 20:01
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lol whose rereg are you?
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Sep 24, 2016 20:03
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spotlessd posted:Marxism provides a much better explanation as to how they won that particular argument than liberal Right Side of History progressivism, I promise you that. I don't disagree with you! I just think you're an rear end in a top hat! I'll cop to posting sloppily, but you're also trying to have a different conversation than the one that this thread wants to have, and it's not going to win you any hearts and minds. Maybe my lovely approach using their language rather than yours is just as useless I'll accept that! Maybe that's not your goal, and if this is how you want to cope that's fine, but do recognize you're tilting at windmills. Octatonic fucked around with this message at 20:17 on Sep 24, 2016 |
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Sep 24, 2016 20:04
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Because... marriage equality is literally the only thing that has happened since 1980.
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Sep 24, 2016 20:33
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Hmmmm... turns out that crazy leftist extremists are just as awful as crazy rightwing extremists. Who would have guessed? Oh, everybody who's been paying attention for even a second? Yeah, my bad.
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Sep 24, 2016 20:42
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spotlessd posted:This is exactly the poo poo I'm on about. Conservatives were saying "AIDS is a plague sent by God to punish perverts" and liberals said "Yep! And the cure for their disgusting sexual hedonism is wholesome, tv-friendly state-sanctioned monogamy", so how did the leftists who were saying "uhhhh how about just healthcare" become the bad guy? You're right, poor gays didn't want to get married until the eight gay warlocks who control the liberal agenda brainwashed them. Therefore, marriage equality is bad and evil because it distracts from the true struggle. Therefore, we would be better off if there were more injustice in America. Sounds real loving leftist to me.
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Sep 24, 2016 21:31
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spotlessd posted:A bunch of garbage. no really whose rereg are you?
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Sep 24, 2016 21:32
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Treating old dudes from the past as infallible fonts of wisdom is probably one of my main annoyances with a lot of people on the far left. It's like they can't accept that their idols were normal human beings who were perfectly capable of having both good and bad ideas at the same time. Morality isn't a zero-sum game. Of course, "treating old dudes from the past as infallible fonts of wisdom" is popular across the board, particularly with the right, but I keep expecting the Left to be better than that. Turns out left-wingers are just as fallible as anyone else.
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Sep 24, 2016 21:36
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Cythereal posted:The bigger problem is that an awful lot of millennials are deeply disillusioned with politics in general. I'm a millennial and I'm voting for Hillary, but there are profound institutional and systemic problems with the American government and no president is capable of fixing them. Rightly or wrongly, Hillary is seen as a deeply establishment candidate and a lot of millennials hate the establishment more than they care for any particular ideology, leading to the popularity of perceived outsiders like Trump, Sanders, Stein, and Johnson with millennials. How strange, people said the same thing about Boomers in the 70s.
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Sep 24, 2016 21:38
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Quorum posted:gay warlocks Tell me more. I've been looking for a good career path.
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Sep 24, 2016 21:40
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computer parts posted:How strange, people said the same thing about Boomers in the 70s. Not strange at all and millennials will most likely drift further into establishment voting blocs as they get older like the generations before them. Right now a lot of millennials are still naive enough to think an outside can change how the country is run, or so disillusioned they don't vote.
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Sep 24, 2016 21:43
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fishmech posted:The vast majority of millennials are already out of college. Only the very youngest are still in high school or college. So most millenials don't need to care about free college that much. Given the sloppy loving definition of 'millenials', some of them have kids getting ready for college.
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Sep 24, 2016 22:19
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A Pale Horse posted:Hmmmm... turns out that crazy leftist extremists are just as awful as crazy rightwing extremists. Who would have guessed? Oh, everybody who's been paying attention for even a second? Yeah, my bad. ThaumPenguin posted:Treating old dudes from the past as infallible fonts of wisdom is probably one of my main annoyances with a lot of people on the far left. Wow this didn't take long at all, did it? Who'd have thought a forum that exists entirely for smarmy liberal morons to congratulate themselves would spend more time pathologizing any view that doesn't fit into a tweet than actually engaging the argument. Tell me more about this irrepressible font of wisdom known as "the middle". (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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Sep 24, 2016 22:53
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spotlessd posted:Tell me more about this irrepressible font of wisdom known as "the middle". Protip, it's not 'truth is in the middle' to say that it's rarely good to go to any side of extremism you moron
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Sep 24, 2016 23:10
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Yardbomb posted:Protip, it's not 'truth is in the middle' to say that it's rarely good to go to any side of extremism you moron That is almost literally exactly what it means.
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Sep 24, 2016 23:17
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spotlessd posted:Wow this didn't take long at all, did it? Who'd have thought a forum that exists entirely for smarmy liberal morons to congratulate themselves would spend more time pathologizing any view that doesn't fit into a tweet than actually engaging the argument. Tell me more about this irrepressible font of wisdom known as "the middle". After you regale us more about how the gays are being manipulated by their liberal masters 
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Sep 24, 2016 23:23
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spotlessd posted:Wow this didn't take long at all, did it? Who'd have thought a forum that exists entirely for smarmy liberal morons to congratulate themselves would spend more time pathologizing any view that doesn't fit into a tweet than actually engaging the argument. Tell me more about this irrepressible font of wisdom known as "the middle". Capitalism is garbage and the workers should control the means of production. Doesn't mean any of the big far-left philosophers should be treated as infallible beings who do no wrong. The entire reason I brought that up was because I've seen it happening several times, like the guy linked in this thread a while ago who claimed that homosexuality had to be bad and wrong because Marx, Engels and Stalin didn't like it. Thanks for making massive assumptions about my political beliefs, though.
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Sep 24, 2016 23:26
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I hope you one day find the strawman liberal you are seeking, so that you can have the very unproductive discussion that you want.
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Sep 24, 2016 23:44
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I'm not very fond of liberalism or centrism, but I can't exactly say that the left or the right has done very much good for LGBT people, y'know, historically. If the left wants to get people on board it's not going to do it by yelling "shut up about your sexuality it's not important". OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 23:57 on Sep 24, 2016 |
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Sep 24, 2016 23:54
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I've always been a leftist, but it's poo poo like this (which I've been hearing from you and entirely too many people in left-wing circles) that's been pushing me away from left-wing politics, to say nothing of a lot of minorities in general, be they sexual, gender, racial, or w/e. Telling us that the things we say we want are wrong and that we're simply deluded or confused for wanting them just minimizes whatever agency we have, and alienates people that really aren't stupid enough to think that our Marxist saviours have the keys to our salvation. Telling us that if we just ignore our own interests in favour of the revolution is really no different than telling people that they'll get theirs in heaven. "Queers shouldn't focus on marriage or social equality, they should focus on $thing_straight_people_want!" "Trans people shouldn't focus on being treated like cis people, they should focus on $thing_cis_people_want!" "Women shouldn't focus on the wage gap or reproductive rights, they should focus on $thing_men_want!" "Racial minorities shouldn't focus so much on discrimination, they should focus on $thing_white_people_want!" Gee, it's almost like doctrinaire leftists are more fixated on things that affect them personally than on issues that are more particular to minorities...
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Sep 25, 2016 00:48
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Holy poo poo, i just realized that I have heard guys yelling about cultural Marxism make this same argument about gay people. I was going to do a long post about why this dude is so full of poo poo but he really isn't worth it. Just know you can suck my dick for thinking "Identity Issues" are preventing your dream of a Marxist rebellion and utopia that may or may not be better for us. Just imagine all of Rick's lines here are me yelling at you. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7vN_PEmeKb0&t=204s
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Sep 25, 2016 01:15
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It's not even as if it's difficult to integrate what generally falls under the label of "identity politics" into a common Marxist outlook. You take the premise that people are entitled, by virtue of being human, to a good standard of life, and those that use established power to suppress others are wankers and need to be toppled, and you extrapolate from there. People are entitled to be who they want as long as they don't unreasonably infringe upon others in doing so, capitalism absolutely stands in the way of that, but so does bigotry and the two are not the same thing. While some areas of identity politics have an economic component, it's simply not true that economic solutions will solve all forms of inequality. At the time Marx was writing he wouldn't have had much concern for those other forms of inequality other than from a general economic perspective, and nowadays that's an important omission. I really think you have to approach Marx from a general egalitarian standpoint and understand that while his ideas are an excellent descriptor of economic inequality and how it perpetuates, it doesn't describe the entire world.
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Sep 25, 2016 01:31
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This thread got really really bad.
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Sep 25, 2016 01:34
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Mr. Nice! posted:This thread got really really bad. I blame capitalism.
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Sep 25, 2016 01:35
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BigRed0427 posted:I blame capitalism. The free market took it in the direction the people wanted. Who are we to argue?
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Sep 25, 2016 01:39
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Pussy Cartel posted:I've always been a leftist, but it's poo poo like this (which I've been hearing from you and entirely too many people in left-wing circles) that's been pushing me away from left-wing politics, to say nothing of a lot of minorities in general, be they sexual, gender, racial, or w/e. Telling us that the things we say we want are wrong and that we're simply deluded or confused for wanting them just minimizes whatever agency we have, and alienates people that really aren't stupid enough to think that our Marxist saviours have the keys to our salvation. You're so incredibly full of poo poo starting with the first sentence of your post. You're just a liberal. Come to terms with that now so we can move on to correcting this idiotic strawman. Oh heavens I was gonna be a leftist but now I'm not so sure! Please. Unless you're a graduate of the OwlFancier Academy of Uh Let's Just Call It Idiosyncratic Marxism you don't have a loving clue what you're even disagreeing with. You would if you read my posts but you blatantly didn't.
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Sep 25, 2016 01:48
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