Foma posted:

Is it for people to break away and start to start Liberal+?

Space Whale posted:

Anti-terrorism laws, crackdowns; infiltrations of less violent leftist groups because there's an excuse to do so because scary black men have guns and kill people. Not just that, but are capable enough to kill super rich people who have hella security and guards and stuff.

Yeah no downsides at all.

(You're trolling and this is sarcasm right?)

SedanChair posted:

I think it's telling that you think you can be more or less "intersectional." You are what you are, there is no ranking, despite every moron in the world talking about "oppression olympics" and trying to put together the grand list of rankings with a black lesbian in a wheelchair at the bottom.

In any case if you are talking about evidence relating to issues of privilege, there is mountains of it. Housing data, job data, you name it. Certain people just won't look at it, even if we cut their eyelids off they wouldn't look.

England Sucks posted:

You are acting like these things do not already occur or do not already exist.

You are completely blind to how far the war has already gone.

Foma posted:

Do people want to debate and discuss or is the left stuck in insular groups and who laugh, point, and get offended.

Space Whale posted:

Yes and conspiracy to kill Waltons wouldn't make it that much worse?

Also I'm a LEO too.

Foma posted:

Foma posted:

Do people want to debate and discuss or is the left stuck in insular groups and who laugh, point, and get offended.

Look at the front page of D&D.

"Right Wing Media: Rachel Maddow for Republicans"
"Got a crazy forwarded political email from your family? Post them here."
"Freepers: Party on, Marxist dogs!"
"The Best (Worst) Of Conservapedia"

It isn't an attempt to engage, it is mocking/degrading. No attempt to find common ground or expand worldviews. It is a bit like bullying it makes you feel strong, but doesn't make your stronger

Foma posted:

Do people want to debate and discuss or is the left stuck in insular groups and who laugh, point, and get offended.

Look at the front page of D&D.

"Right Wing Media: Rachel Maddow for Republicans"
"Got a crazy forwarded political email from your family? Post them here."
"Freepers: Party on, Marxist dogs!"
"The Best (Worst) Of Conservapedia"

It isn't an attempt to engage, it is mocking/degrading. No attempt to find common ground or expand worldviews. It is a bit like bullying it makes you feel strong, but doesn't make your stronger

England Sucks posted:

There is no common ground to be had anymore. The right wing in America can not be reasoned with.

tsa posted:

The us vs. them of the left here is every bit as strong as the average teapartier. Actually tea partiers might be more willing to hear opposing ideas.


Perfect example right here. Complete us vs. them that would make Bush blush. Honestly there's no better support of the points made in the OP than the posters responses' here to any criticism.

MoaM posted:

It would be more helpful to actually show England Sucks examples of Republicans/Right-Wing Americans having reasonable views on key issues rather than adding yet another "I don't like the tone of leftist politics" post to the pile.

tsa posted:

The us vs. them of the left here is every bit as strong as the average teapartier. Actually tea partiers might be more willing to hear opposing ideas.


Perfect example right here. Complete us vs. them that would make Bush blush. Honestly there's no better support of the points made in the OP than the posters responses' here to any criticism.

tsa posted:

The us vs. them of the left here is every bit as strong as the average teapartier. Actually tea partiers might be more willing to hear opposing ideas.


Perfect example right here. Complete us vs. them that would make Bush blush. Honestly there's no better support of the points made in the OP than the posters responses' here to any criticism.

quote:

I was standing in the National Mall, surrounded by nearly a quarter million people, when I realized I wasn’t a liberal.

I had come to Washington, along with 215,000 others, to participate in Jon Stewart’s “Rally to Restore Sanity,” an event inspired by Glenn Beck’s “Rally to Restore Honor.” The festival reached its height as the spectators were treated to a video montage of fire-breathing pundits from all the major news networks denouncing their political opponents.

The message was clear: Those who tell you there are fundamental differences between Americans that are worth getting emphatically angry about are lying to you.

This divided America — an America that contains people with radically different values and radically different ideas of what a just, moral society looks like — does not exist. If it seems otherwise, it is simply because, as one sign at the rally put it, we fail to use our “inside voices.”

Standing in the crowd, I felt my eyebrows furrow. True, the antics of cable news conflict do nothing to contribute to the national discourse. True, most American citizens are more complex than the buffoons we rightly dismiss as “pundits.” Yet for all their shameless spectacle-making, the talking heads of the national news media do get one thing right: There are substantial, and fundamental, oppositions between Americans.

Yet if mainstream liberal outlets are your major news sources, you would never know it. Stewart himself drove this point home with his final speech, an earnest paean to looking past our differences, built on the assumption that ultimately we all share the same goals, hopes, and dreams.

This conceit — that the fundamental divides creating discord in America are easily corrected by a cool head and an open mind — is perhaps the most central ideological tenet of contemporary liberalism. It’s also a major obstacle to a more egalitarian society.

Of course, the primary target of liberals’ ire is the Tea Party echo chamber of conservative commentary. As Stewart put it, “We have a special place in our hearts for Fox.” Yet ironically, the Right’s willingness to recognize conflict occasionally results in more clarity from them than from liberals.

Take the battle of obituaries that commenced between liberals and the Left after the death of Nelson Mandela. Liberals mostly wrote what they would be expected to write: appreciations of Mandela as a model of non-violent resistance while ignoring the radical dimensions of his political project. The Left responded with the type of corrective history that has become commonplace every year Martin Luther King Day rolls around.

Usually neglected in such commentaries, however, was an acknowledgment that other voices in the political conversation also recognize the radical legacy of figures like Mandela and King — conservatives. Such conservatives did appear, but they were treated by liberals as self-evident examples of the Right’s intellectual bankruptcy, paraded out as more proof of how hysterical their movement has become.

Yet lost in all of these festive roastings of the Tea Party was the fact that the right-wing “crazies” were closer to the truth than the liberals. After all, as many a leftist columnist pointed out and celebrated, Mandela did at one point advocate the use of violence as a means to liberation, did participate in communist politics, and was, at least earlier in his career, a radical.

But in liberal discourse, the erroneousness of the Right is assumed, and the moral of the story again becomes one of the dangers of polarization and ideology. In liberals’ view there is no conflict, so recognizing and naming your enemy is necessarily an act of distortion.

Moreover, by encouraging us to be anxious about open conflict, liberalism actually masks how today’s political debate obscures as much as highlights our differences.

Recoiling from the screaming and name-calling, liberals point to conflict-oriented infotainment as toxic to the public discourse. Yet because they are so distracted by the surface noise, they miss the undisturbed bedrock of consensus positions.

In debates about poverty policy, for example, liberals often do push back against the nearly sociopathic desire of conservatives to destroy the welfare state. If you really want to fight poverty, they insist, you need to help folks get back on the job, not leave them at the mercy of circumstance.

Remaining undisturbed, however, is the assumption that the solution to poverty is to push as many poor people as possible into the job market — to “fix” poor folks rather than restructure the economic institutions that place them in such a quagmire. The fact that this charade of a debate often involves yelling creates the illusion that a fundamental difference is being discussed — but it’s merely the means that are being disputed.

At the same time, identifying fundamental disagreements that do exist becomes extremely difficult when one cannot even name what is being struggled over — power. For at the root of the liberal denial of conflict is the liberal denial of power. And on this falsehood, all attempts to honestly confront conflict run afoul.

To say that liberals struggle with the concept of power is so familiar that it seems like a truism at this point. Indeed, even liberals themselves – on their leftmost flank, at least – often engage in this critique. Yet as G.E. Lessing once wrote, even those who mock their chains are not always free, and even self-conscious liberals still continually ignore or downplay power.

Liberals in academia, for example, frequently find ways to avoid questions of power. Consider the last twenty years of scholarship on conservatism. While much of this work confronts power directly, the field itself implicitly rests on two questions: What in the world is conservatism about and how did it become so successful after World War II?

Indeed, some scholars are so discombobulated by these problems that when one provides what seem like obvious answers — racism, sexism, and a lopsided class struggle — they respond with disbelief that anyone could offer so reductive an assessment.

Yet the importance of such scholarship is more than just academic. For when no one is understood as protecting a position of power, strategies designed to confront that power directly are deemed illegitimate.

Direct action is characterized as undemocratic, opposition to hate speech is described as hate speech, and boycotts attempting to put pressure on Israel are attacked as dogmatic at best and antisemitic at worst.

And unsurprisingly, much shortsighted handwringing ensues. Such strategies are intended to call the bluff that there are no sides by explicitly, and emphatically, taking a side. Those who prefer the illusion of principled neutrality sense an implied criticism of their conduct in such a move, and respond with even more furious declarations of the infinite complexity of the question and the simplicity of those taking a stand. Defining legitimate modes of opposition, then, is not only an intellectual tendency, but also a reflexive act of self-defense.

Thus by policing the acceptable boundaries of conflict, liberals end up denying the existence of conflict altogether. Injustice, in the liberal narrative, is a product of misunderstanding, an offspring of faceless processes that no one really benefits from and only the ignorant line up in defense of.

So blind is the liberal gaze to questions of power that even something as clearly based in domination as the Jim Crow regime is recast, as in the arguments of Gunnar Myrdal, as merely an awkward and irrational contradiction in Americans’ hearts, easily corrected if exposed as incompatible with the supposedly egalitarian ethic of the “American Creed.”

In the liberal imagination, education and accommodation are self-evident solutions, since the problem can neither be understood as a matter of brute power struggles nor as a product of structural inequality fundamental to the functioning of entire institutions.

The hundreds of murals that decorate the walls of cultural centers and student resource buildings across the country attest to this narrative of victims without victimizers. We see images of people holding flags and coming together. But who they are organizing against is rarely depicted. Where are the riot cops, the angry business owners, the hedge fund managers, the anti-choice and anti-gay protesters, the Young Americans for Freedom in these montages?

In this picture book version of social justice struggle, no one ever opposes freedom’s forward march. All the oppressed need to do is rise up and assert themselves; the world they are fighting for is realized simply by the act of self-declaration.

This blind spot is strictly enforced. Activists who try to put the oppressors back in the picture are either dismissed as illegitimate, and if they still refuse to go away, are dealt with by the police and by the courts.

It makes it exceedingly difficult to hold anyone responsible for their actions. The representatives of the liberal order can always cry good intentions and open dialogue, denying that, through their behavior and affiliations, they have already taken a side that is in opposition to the interests of those who protest them.

Earlier this year the great American folk singer Pete Seeger died at the age of 95. One of Seeger’s most recognizable recordings, an old union ballad, poses a simple question: Which side are you on? In our political culture today, posing political problems so starkly has become increasingly difficult, met on the personal level with uncomfortable declarations of uncertainty and neutrality, and on the political level with the hypocritical (and yet accurate) accusation that such questions push an agenda of class war.

And despite the contributions of liberals like Stewart in exposing the bankruptcy of the Right, this crucial reality — that there are power struggles to be fought and won — was missing that day in Washington.

But what else can be expected? You can’t choose a side when liberalism insists there are no sides at all.

tsa posted:

Y-You're just as bad as them, guys!

Space Whale posted:

Unless I'm mistaken, it's just an alliteration for "collection of things" like "mob of mooks" as a nonsense word. Then there was a Korean war and Gook became an insult, and to say "gook" in isolation is to be clearly racist.

Did it only exist as a racist term in the first place and then got normalized to the point I heard it growing up without any obvious racist connotations?

England Sucks posted:

It's not a us vs them mentality. It is reality. Trying to communicate and find common ground with these kinds of people is impossible. They do not react to intelligence. They react to power pure and simple.

Beyond that the vast majority of them do not want common ground with anyone. They are stuck in a us vs them mentality of their own. We can try and pretend they are not but that would be a waste of time. You can not reach these kinds of people once the brainwashing is done it sticks. The media has made sure of that.

Feel free trying to waste your time communicating and speaking the facts to people whose very nature and upbringing leads them to ignore the facts. We've tried it before. We know how it works out. See Obamacare.

There is no reasoning. There is no common ground. The only hope left is either violent extreme revolution that destroys the entire fabric of this country from every government entity and legal binding document ever written; or using the exact same tactics used by the right: media control and brainwashing of the retarded public with religious and patriotic messages; for the greater good.

Go watch Snowpiercer. The system is broken. You can not save it. It can not be worked for any greater good. It must be destroyed.

Job Truniht posted:

This is such a lovely cop out argument. Maybe next time you can try arguing with us instead of trying to shame us into submission for no good loving reason. Political instability and political insolvency are not the products of radicalism. They are the result of decades of pushing unsustainable policy, milquetoast reform, and compromise. The worst thing, literally the worst thing, that could ever happen is that the pendulum between stability and violent revolution stops swinging.

Helsing posted:

How is it "beside the point" when your entire argument was that D&D somehow embodies "leftist tendencies"?

Foma posted:

"Freepers: Party on, Marxist dogs!"
"The Best (Worst) Of Conservapedia"

Foma posted:

The Right (which is nebulous as you have social conservatives and libertarians in the same grouping) is reasonable
about the Keystone Pipeline

Radley Balko http://www.washingtonpost.com/people/radley-balko is right about ways to limit police abuse and brutality

Reason is right on a lot of the asset forfeiture stuff.

Not sure if Tyler Cowen is right in Average is Over, but his ideas are worth thinking about http://marginalrevolution.com/

Nevvy Z posted:

I dunno if these are really the sites we should be approaching with an open mind that they may be right.

England Sucks posted:

Making things worse would mostly affect innocent citizens. It would increase resentment towards the government and bring more chaos to the already chaotic system. These are actually desirable outcomes from a perspective of the terrorists. The goal would be to push the entire nation to the edge until a violent revolution in inevitable.

Foma posted:

I am not suggesting we take those sites seriously, I am saying that picking the smallest retard on the playground pointing and laughing at them might make you feel big, but doesn't make you big.

Armani posted:

I post in peace and mean no harm: I THINK the term got telephoned to you from 'Gobbledygook':

gob·ble·dy·gook
ˈɡäbəldēˌɡo͞ok/
nouninformal
noun: gobbledegook
language that is meaningless or is made unintelligible by excessive use of abstruse technical terms; nonsense.

This is my guess. This is a term that's still used openly, and it's drat old.

Foma posted:

I am not suggesting we take those sites seriously, I am saying that picking the smallest retard on the playground pointing and laughing at them might make you feel big, but doesn't make you big.

Who What Now posted:

We aren't bullying people, though. No one is going onto Conservapedia or Freep and harassing the people there. They are completely unaware that such threads exist and their lives are no worse for it. So while you can muster all the righteous indignation that you want it's completely misplaced in this instance.

Space Whale posted:

Well not SA specifically since Raids Don't Happen Anymore! Also forums like this are very much passe.

Now if you look at poo poo that's actually current and popular...

Who What Now posted:

I don't give a gently caress about other sites.

The Snark posted:

I almost took this seriously. The final line should have been a warning, thank to you whoever bought their avatar for the rest.

quote:

Yes, most people affected would be innocent. But most people who aren't involved wouldn't be affected. They'd see poo poo on tv and go "idiots, stay inside, go to work!" and go back to their dead end jobs the next day after a night of Netflix.

England Sucks posted:

That's why you target Netflix and the media in general. You destroy escapism as a option so that the general public is left with nothing but reality and has to face the truth.

wateroverfire posted:

I said D&D is a great cure for leftist tendencies. IDK what it would mean to "somehow embody" leftist tendencies and that doesn't even make sense.

Helsing posted:

Is English not your native language? To embody something means to give it tangible or visible form. Isn't the implication of your post that because D&D manifests all the bad tendencies of leftism it will therefore scare away rational people? If not then your post would seemingly be a complete non sequitur.

Mineaiki posted:

You can't reason with people who are wholeheartedly reactionary about their politics because by definition they are on the defensive politically. Gay marriage isn't just something the right doesn't like, it's something that they have convinced themselves is a real threat to their core values and way of life in order to justify being so strongly against it. So when you reach across the aisle to try to compromise with them you're saying "Hey, how about instead of burning down every church in America and forcing your kids to be gay like we really want, we just burn down half the churches and just make all the teachers in schools gay?"

beepo posted:

I think the difference between lefties and staunch right wingers is that the left sees the average right winger as being mislead by the powerful or even willfully ignorant, but that they can be changed and educated.

Blue Star posted:

Sounds like another "political correctness gone mad" opinion piece. I don't buy it. Oppressed people do not have to take the feelings of oppressors into account, nor should they. Most men are misogynist. White people are racist. Sorry if that hurts somebody's feelings.

Space Whale posted:

include or contain (something) as a constituent part.
"the changes in law embodied in the Freedom of Information Act"
synonyms: incorporate, include, contain, encompass; More

beepo posted:

I think the difference between lefties and staunch right wingers is that the left sees the average right winger as being mislead by the powerful or even willfully ignorant, but that they can be changed and educated. A small but significant portion of the right sees the left as morally bankrupt or even evil. Even if evidence supports the "liberal" position, if you think liberals are bad humans you probably wont be swayed. Spending time trying to win over the right through arguments doesn't really work.

A united left pushing through progressive policies that actually help people will be far more effective at swaying people over to the left. The left gets caught up trying to be ideologically perfect and often forgets about pragmatism. Trying to score burn points and telling other progressives to check their privilege does nothing to actually achieve goals. Supporting other progressives, even if you disagree with them on a few issues, will yield better results than trying to force out anyone that disagrees ever so slightly with you.

Rortybomb posted:

This dynamic Jaffe describes was found in the sociologist’s Ziad Munson’s excellent ethnography The Making of Pro-Life Activists: How Social Movement Mobilization Works. From the book (my bold):

quote:

The link between beliefs and action must be turned on its head: real action often precedes meaningful beliefs about an issue. Demographic and attitudinal differences between activists and nonactivists cannot explain why some people join the pro-life movement and others do not. Instead, mobilization occurs when people are drawn into activism through organizational and relational ties, not when they form strong beliefs about abortion. Beliefs about abortion are often underdeveloped, incoherent, and inconsistent until individuals become actively engaged with the movement. The “process of conviction” (Maxwell 2002) is the result of mobilization, not a necessary prerequisite for it (pg. 20).

Here’s a summary. From the copy: “Munson makes the startling discovery that many activists join up before they develop strong beliefs about abortion—in fact, some are even pro-choice prior to their mobilization. Therefore, Munson concludes, commitment to an issue is often a consequence rather than a cause of activism.”

Strudel Man posted:

The second reply to this thread, and first argument against it, was the following.

Really, I think a lot of the left has entirely given up on changing anyone's opinions. Current political opponents are misogynistic, racist oppressors who have to die for anything to change.

Helsing posted:

We also have to recognize - and I know it's a bit reductive to say this, but I think it's still accurate - that humans have a natural propensity to try and control or dominate each other. Flinging around accusations of privilege can be a way to signal that you're part of the right 'in group' and a way to control the language of other people. Obviously I don't believe this is the only motivation for the whole privilege discourse, because I think in some cases privilege is a relevant concept to use, but I think we'd have to be blind to ignore the fact that some people use privilege theory in this fashion.