Futute 11111
Feminists here don't deserve the right/respect to speak out against racists - Icon should be removed.
Anarcho-Feminism(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarcha-feminism) by identifying with Valerie Solanas advocates to "destroy the male sex". An inhuman agenda, whose only ties to anarchism may be rock throwing against the obstacles to their evil. They should not be welcome, much less allowed to speak down to lesser evil racists.
starting at this thread Emma Goldman's views on gender equality have all been satisfied in the last 100 years. There is no remaining feminist aim that can be associated with her. If she dissassociated herself from suffragists, she would definitely reject Solanas.
I demand a justification for accepting militant feminist rock throwers as anarchists and humans. I ask that the logo be wiped of their stain
https://www.reddit.com/r/stupidpol/comments/nt9tar/guys_did_you_know_antifa_and_wwii_veterans_are/
Communist is to also be an abolitionist. Understanding that the struggles for socialism and Black self-determination are parallel but intertwined, as both Lenin and Winston noted, is to see that abolitionist ideas are realistic and are not constrained to a socialist revolution. However, if abolitionist ideas are implemented, they can lead to the dismantling of capitalism itself. We must continue to find ways to fight racial and national oppression by expanding people’s control over their communities and abolishing the prison-industrial complex and the police violence that enables it to function.
I'm too far left because I want to bring back usury laws. Nationalize the banks and the pharmaceutical companies. Unionize every workplace. Provide health care for all. Fund college or technical education for everyone. Ban campaign contributions. Eliminate the electoral college. Institute public control of law enforcement. End the war on drugs. Close refugee detention centers. Demilitarize the police. Tear down the border fence. Defund the Pentagon. Close all military bases. Redistribute land to Native American/Indigenous peoples. Enact reparations for slavery. Eliminate the CIA, FBI, NSA, and Dept. of Homeland Security. Restore privacy protections. Demand a new constitution. Redistribute wealth. Return eco-systems to their pre-colonial state. Abolish student and medical debt. Imprison war criminals. End illegal military aggression. Provide restitution for victims of American imperialism anywhere in the world. And end mass surveillance. For starters.
https://www.reddit.com/r/socialism/comments/32dvon/why_doesnt_the_right_have_the_sectarianism_the/
But the left has work to do, not only on policy and organization but also on attitude. Too many of my progressive friends seem to have forgotten how to make actual arguments, and have become expert instead at condemnation, derision and mockery. On issue after issue, they’re very good at explaining why no one could oppose their policy positions except for the basest of motives. As to those positions themselves, they are too often announced with a zealous solemnity suggesting that their views are Holy Writ -- and those who disagree are cast into the outer political darkness. In short, the left has lately been dripping with hubris, which in classic literature always portends a fall.[35]
use satanic panic type parables to criticize lgbt race things
to rigt winh anti corps its ngos that drive corps
far lib thid wing
believe that Jordan Peterson should be fired, then I would assume that you agree that Suzzana Walters should also be fired for her hateful rhetoric? That would make logical sense, however many people who are entrenched in their ideologies are often illogical and support radical voices as long as those voices align with their own thinking. This is why its great to be an egalitarian, you can actually see the forest through the trees unlike many others
That is not what I'm saying Cathy Newman. What I'm saying is it is a matter of perspective. Everyone holds certain biases, people who are neck deep in ideologies hold some of the strongest ones. More moderate people are generally better at being able to see the arguments on both sides for what they are and not get caught up in whether certain arguments match their ideology. This is why many extreme elements of ideologies (like Suzanna Walters hatred of men) is given a pass by people who are in the same camp. Reality is, regardless on which "side" you support, hatred is hatred, sexism is sexism, racism is racism, it shouldn't matter which side you align with. If your a feminist supporting other feminists that hate men, you're in the wrong. If your an MRA who supports other MRA's who hate women, you're in the wrong. It's simple logic, however all logic goes out the window when you eat an ideology for breakfast, lunch and dinner.
course they don't. They've decided he's bigoted because that's what other feminists told them to believe. It sure is convenient to be able to dismiss any opposition to your argument without actually taking the time to understand anything they're saying
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Jasontheperson
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4 yr. ago
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I understand that "forced monogamy" is bad.
peide anti
inclusive lib tolerance wrong but endure
r nixonprog economics to pre counter socialism me sort of
subreddit drama
ago
Additional comment actions
Just want to clarify your viewpoints first so I can understand your argument
https://www.reddit.com/r/stupidpol/comments/hgjuk8/on_racecraft/
Tendehka
161d
I'm so tired of trans people's lives being considered "politics". It's not. It's people debating if others have a right to exist.
That's not just "politics", that's being actively hateful.
truly_beyond_belief
160d
And the transphobes have recycled every bit of it -- "shoving it down our throats"; "grooming"; "conversion" -- from the overt homophobia that terrorized me and my friends in the 1970s and 1980s.
I'm with you. I'm exhausted and I just want it all to stop.
con bill transp donations
Mixed feelings, because if I donate $20 to a candidate or PAC or something, I don’t really want leftists coming after me for doing so.
On the other hand, somebody who’s donating $10,000, or $10 million does need to be made public
stoop idpol
politics
Articles focusing on the identity, pursuit, arrest/charging, or actions of individuals involved in the riots are off-topic and will be removed, as they are more about the criminal justice element of the story as opposed to the broader political context. Submissions focused on statements from politicians, the incident as a whole, or new legislation related to it are more likely to be topically appropriate for r/Politics and to be approved. We understand that this is not a simple ‘on/off’ binary line and that users may be confused as to why a specific submission was removed, but we want to make sure that the subreddit maintains its focus on politics and governmental processes and does not shift over to criminal justice stories.
Some
https://www.justfactsdaily.com/the-science-of-abortion-when-does-life-begin/
https://www.abort73.com/abortion/medical_testimony/
stupidpol proudboys
?
A
https://www.reddit.com/r/stupidpol/comments/d492jr/rneoliberal_what_is_your_least_woke_opinion/
https://www.reddit.com/r/stupidpol/comments/96qx6a/children_as_young_as_four_to_be_taught_about/
by rape, sex positivity, and sex work. In different ways than women sometimes, but still affected. Why do you think they're not? fem reddit
Glenn Greenwald: Journalist Echo Chamber on Twitter Led to Cassidy Hutchinson Fail
bretibart ^ | 30 Jun 2022 | ALLUM BOKHARI
Posted on 7/1/2022, 3:30:35 AM by MarvinStinson
Glenn Greenwald castigated the state of modern journalism in a tweet thread yesterday, arguing that the progressive ideological echo-chamber that currently governs the industry is responsible for the repeated spread of untrue stories like Russiagate and Cassidy Hutchinson’s now-infamous claim that Donald Trump grabbed the steering wheel of a presidential limo.
“As any lawyer will tell you (if being honest), few things are less reliable than a proceeding with no adversarial component. These hearings have zero,” Greenwald said of the increasingly farcical of the January 6th committee. “One can assign whatever blame one wants for that, but perhaps it means journalists should be…skeptical…of assertions there.”
Greenwald slammed fellow journalists for conducting their work in an echo-chamber, insulated from potentially useful feedback from conservative reporters.
“If, yesterday, you followed conservative journalists or analysts — and really, why would anyone do such a thing: just block and ignore them — you’d have heard instant skepticism even over the physics of Hutchinson’s claim that Trump was able to grab the wheel of the Beast,” said Greenwald. “Journalistic* skepticism, not cheerleading, is needed.”
“If, as a journalist, you don’t *instantly* join the liberal mob — if you wait to see how facts emerge — you stand accused of sin. But if you jump on board, applause, virality and cable bookings are yours.”
“It’s literally impossible to count how many times during the Trump years some *blockbuster!* Russiagate event materialized – the thing that was going to be the fatal blow – and journalists spent all day on Twitter reflexively peddling it, only to watch it fall apart over and over.”
“For many (I’d say: most) corporate journalists, “Twitter” = “liberal Twitter” = “the only constituency that matters.”
gay shame have it too easy
shitliberalssay The problem with the world that it still has a lot of evil, corrupt, powerful men. The obvious and the only solution is gender diversity. (anti hilary) Yes, because the solution to a problem is just make more of that problem and pretend the problem doesn’t exist. shitliberalssay
https://polcompballanarchy.miraheze.org/wiki/Nietzscheanism
https://web.archive.org/web/20220902144839/https://www.workers.org/educational/
“you preachers of equality: your most secret ambitions to be tyrants thus shroud themselves in words of virtue.” : r/Nietzsche
Human labor is a commodity — a thing of value also a value that, when used, creates value. It is from the labor of the worker that the owner derives profit. If a worker is slated to work eight hours, a small percentage of that time is spent covering the cost of the worker’s wage. The rest of the time is unpaid labor — surplus labor — and it is from this that the owner gains extra or surplus value.
shitliberalssay gay, I'm absolutely disgusted when Western corporations use rainbow symbols to pretend to support solidarity with LGBTQ people like me while the corporations support imperialism and neocolonialism.
https://billayers.org/2017/03/16/capitalism-is-bad-for-your-health/
https://www.rt.com/uk/529606-labour-shadow-minister-ayn-rand/
W]hen anti-Semitism is everywhere, it is nowhere. And when every anti-Zionist is an anti-Semite, we no longer know how to recognize the real thing—the concept of anti-Semitism loses its significance. —Brian Klug[25]
He was an egalitarian, but he argued more for equal opportunity and placed meritocracy above all other ideals in this regard. According to Mill, a socialist society would only be attainable through the provision of basic education for all, promoting economic democracy instead of capitalism, in the manner of substituting capitalist businesses with worker cooperatives. He says:
The form of association, however, which if mankind continue to improve, must be expected in the end to predominate, is not that which can exist between a capitalist as chief, and work-people without a voice in the management, but the association of the labourers themselves on terms of equality, collectively owning the capital with which they carry on their operations, and working under managers elected and removable by themselves.[100][101]
Strauss argued that liberalism in its modern form (which is oriented toward universal freedom as opposed to "ancient liberalism" which is oriented toward human excellence), contained within it an intrinsic tendency towards extreme relativism, which in turn led to two types of nihilism:[68]
The first was a "brutal" nihilism, expressed in Nazi and Bolshevik regimes. In On Tyranny, he wrote that these ideologies, both descendants of Enlightenment thought, tried to destroy all traditions, history, ethics, and moral standards and replace them by force under which nature and mankind are subjugated and conquered.[69] The second type—the "gentle" nihilism expressed in Western liberal democracies—was a kind of value-free aimlessness and a hedonistic "permissive egalitarianism", which he saw as permeating the fabric of contemporary American society.[70][71]
In the belief that 20th-century relativism, scientism, historicism, and nihilism were all implicated in the deterioration of modern society and philosophy, Strauss sought to uncover the philosophical pathways that had led to this situation. The resultant study led him to advocate a tentative return to classical political philosophy as a starting point for judging political action.[72]
Strauss's interpretation of Plato's Republic[edit]
According to Strauss, The Republic by Plato is not "a blueprint for regime reform" (a play on words from Karl Popper's Op
Whether You Like It or Not" advertisement
0:07
Gay marriage press conference, 2008
In the months leading up to Election Day, Proposition 8 supporters released a commercial featuring San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom stating in a speech regarding same-sex marriage: "This door's wide open now. It's going to happen, whether you like it or not."[95] Some observers noted that polls shifted in favor of Proposition 8 following the release of the commercial; this, in turn, led to much speculation about Newsom's unwitting role in the passage of the amendment.[96][97][98]
The idea that gender is a spectrum is a new gender prison
Jun 28, 2016 — The solution is to abolish gender altogether. We do not need gender. We would be better off without it. Gender as a hierarchy with two positions ...
We really need to get people to understand that criticizing what a religion teaches is not equivalent to being a racist. People criticize Christianity and Christians all the time yet no one goes around calling them a racist for doing so. Jews aren’t a race I don’t care what anyone says, they are followers of Judaism. The twelve tribes of Israel were lost, no one can directly trace their roots back to them. It is just as likely white Christians today are from those tribes as it is people calling themselves Jews today
An Injustice!
https://aninjusticemag.com › the-ne...
The Necessity of Gender Abolition | by Laura Halls
Nov 27, 2021 — But where does gender abolition come in? True gender abolition goes hand in hand with a Marxist or communist program.
One of the greatest weapons of 'progressives' is this idea that the 'progression' they advocate (because there are other kinds) is somehow natural and inevitable. Kind of like the marxists claiming history was on their side and that capitalism would collapse under its own contradictions. Some of them were still spouting this the day before the Berlin wall collapsed. Anyway, the point is that this enables them to assert that your opposition to affirmative action, or gay 'marriage' sounds exactly the same as the opposition to slavery, or mixed race marriage, in years gone by. You are a dinosaur, who will be judged by the future as a bigot and a racist. Get on the right side of history man!
Of course it's all twaddle, designed to win arguments by sheer bluff rather than have to go through all that logic and hard debate work. There is no reason why current social trends in drug use, abortion, or sexual activity cannot be reversed, or even sheer off in some other direction. Sexual and social mores have oscillated from one extreme to another for centuries, as even a cursory examination of history will illustrate. All it requires is for people to think differently on these matters, and that is what we are in politics for. Just because the other side claims that they will prevail doesnt mean that they will, unless of course by shouting that so loud they shut us up.
In other words, FRiend...do not despair! The world may not bend to your wishes often, but it doesn't bend to theirs either.
sidpol
I read Wilderson’s book when it was fashionable, it was a fun ride good writing but the whole premise is just nuts—im going to live in apartheid land bc america is too soft and all these whities are just lying to me and secretly wish they could oppress me? This is mental illness and persecution complex as literature
https://www.reddit.com/r/stupidpol/comments/x04020/adolph_reed_afropessimism_or_black_studies_as_a/
https://www.4pt.su/en/content/theoretical-principles-great-awakening-based-fourth-political-theory
Alain Soral
Do you read Russian? In Introduction to Geopolitics, Dugin shows his hand in a way that Fourth Political Theory or the other Arktos books don’t.
Guess which of his books has yet to be properly translated into English? It ain’t Fourth Political Theory, I’ll tell you that.
Dugin’s a garden-variety ThirdPos fascist. His “leftist” rhetoric is just that: rhetoric. He prides himself on possessing the sort of cloak-and-dagger cunning necessary for getting ethnonationalist and commie alike to help realize his bizarre and apocalyptic conception of Russia.
Please don’t fall for it.
EDIT: His “disavowal” of the alt-right is purely tactical and not grounded in any principled opposition to racism. He values racism insofar as it benefits Russia, and rejects it insofar as it impedes Russian imperialism.
Racism is intrinsically divisive, so Dugin is going to support it when it occurs in (say) the US, and play the universalist antiracist when it comes to (say) the Baltics or the Chechens, whom he’ll happily welcome/conquer as “fellow Russians.”
splc
White nationalist groups espouse white supremacist or white separatist ideologies, often focusing on the alleged inferiority of nonwhites. Groups listed in a variety of other categories—Ku Klux Klan, neo-Confederate, neo-Nazi, racist skinhead and Christian Identity—could also be fairly described as white nationalist.
Dugin is no idiot: he knows how mass media works, so you’ll never find him endorsing racism in English (and likely not in Russian now, either—not publicly, at least). But he doesn’t need to. Like American neocons, he’d rather sow discord behind the scenes. That’s actually a major part of Osnovy geopolitiki.
Dugin is basically a Russian neocon
No, but I'm aware of his imperialist pretensions and I definitely don't support them since it is the antithesis to what he describes as the foundation of a fourth political theory. He's written a lot of weird shit that I don't agree with, but that doesn't mean there aren't still interesting things to consider.
I'm just saying that it's a mistake for the modern left to leave walk over to the far right when it comes to issues like mass immigration of an unskilled underclass, anti-liberalism, non-interventionism, anti-globalism etc.
Look at what Beppe Grillo and the five star movement in Italy has accomplished by simply listening to what people actually want. The average guy is open to left-wing economic policies, but apprehensive about the necessity of aimless subversion of Tradition and uni-polar globalism.
I was thinking it would be more as a basis for discussion. I think most people on this sub would appreciate a well formulated counter-argument than a downvote and smug "lol you're a retard". Discussing political differences isn't a bad thing in my book. Challenging your own ideas is how you grow
certainly interesting stuff, and very obscure. I would really like it to get more attention so we can build stronger arguments against it.
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American_Worker_Rise
Xi/Xin/Ping
1y
Why against
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xerxesisbae
Schizo
1y
Because most of it is wrong in the end. Just it looks very convincing at first.
antoniorisky
:soy: Rightoid
1y
It doesn't help that every CRT spewing radlib calls themself a marxists and insists that their idpol poisoned view of the world is what Marxism is about.
Conservatives: "This anti-white, anti-men stuff is marxist!"
Radlibs: "Yeah!"
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[deleted]
1y
Cultural Marxism in regards to actual Marxist thought and theory isn’t real at all.
The problem is wokies with “anti capitalist, socialist or Marxist” in their Twitter bios have co opted Marxism and parade their world view as “Marxist
This disconnect comes from the fact that rightoids think wokies are actual Marxist’s
Is the idea of “Cultural Marxism” as dumb as I think it is, or is there something I’m missing?
It's as dumb as you think it is.
Cultural marxism is a right wing pejorative of the Frankfurt school, a collection of some unorthodox marxists in the early and mid 20th century who started critical theory. Critical theory, who's influence in the academy in a the variety of settings outlived the frankfurt school's, which evolved/devolved into regular continental philosophy imo.
Cultural marxism is also basically a conspiracy theory that the frankfurt school and later all postmodern theorists are part of a cabal of jews and marxists who are trying to destroy western civilization by infiltration of our universities and schools to brainwash the youth into believing in things such as:
- Homosexual sex
-resisting authority
-excessive drinking
-destroying the nuclear family
-feminism, marxism, environmentalism etc
And they also believe that cultural marxists are responsible for events such as:
-the 60s counter culture
-the invention of modern art
-The feminist movement, the LGBT movement, the environmentalism movement, the black nationalist movement.
-And now they are responsible for all the identity politics metoo stuff.
Honestly. Cultural Marxists sound pretty based. I wish there was such a cabal of jews and marxists. Too bad they don't exist
Libertarian Socialist] Best War-Gulf War Worst War-Lebanon War
1y
To expand on that, the prefix "neo" is often added to designations when you want to disparage someone/something but can't actually prove it.
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XsentientFr0g
Personalist
1y
Intersectionalists and Critical Race Theory advocates are not shy about their being influenced by Marx. I agree that their ideas are contrary to Marxism (historical-dialectical materialism), however it’s asinine to say it’s not “proven” or that the concept comes from the right wing. They aren’t creative enough to come up with such things on their own.
Marxism” is really just the Frankfurt School and French post-structuralism ideologically. Complaining about the phrasing is frankly irrelevant because everyone actually knows what it means. Regarding the plot part, the Frankfurt school left Germany due to Nazi Germany and found a home in the USA. They left the USA shortly after WWII and found a home in West Germany as unironic Marxists that saw zero opposition from US hegemony in the region, some of them also stayed in the USA. Considering that they were freely allowed to operate by the USA then I view them as simply a tool of subversion.
The USA keeping them around after winning the war and entering the Cold War would be similar to Germany winning the war against the Soviets and then just leaving a bunch of Trotskyites into their post-war puppet states.
Before anyone brings up some esoteric resistance that the USA showed towards them remember that the USA could´ve easily disappeared them all if it wished to do so.
joooooo
I love how they say saying any Jewish person has loyalties to Israel is antisemitism libel, but you also can't criticise Israel because its deeply personally offensive to Jews who all hold Israel has their true homeland.
CAA have always been far right disingenuous loons, they literally regularly campaigned with the BNP and British Far Right and not a single major outlet picked that up
delicious_crackers
Capitalism = Fermi's Filter 🛸
94d
Jewish groups seem like one of those things in politics that you just have to ignore, I have no idea who this is but whenever I hear "Jewish groups" or any variation of that phrase in political news I just tune it out because 99% of the time it's histrionic screeching about anuddah shoah over some no-name politician making a public statement that maybe Israel flattening a Palestinian city with heavy artillery is bad.
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Tacky-Terangreal
Socialist Her-storian
94d
The NYC ones declared a fucking jihad on Andrew Yang when he mildly suggested that he thought baby genital mutilation was wrong. No matter how many questionable statements someone makes, groups like the ADL will latch onto the most innocuous one with the most deranged take imaginable
pedia
https://www.conservapedia.com/2020_Leftwing_insurrection
Alternate history/fan fiction
So, as is becoming apparent, the media is subject to pushed narratives, and I'm seeing this trickle across to Wikipedia itself, where the articles are edited by with a very hard slant.
Heck, if you notice, pretty much any mention of a separatist movement in Donbass is taken as a complete fabrication, citing pretty bad sources, and heavily pushed by users like this guy.
I mean, this article looks like it was written by the White House. Just have a look at this Talk page.
With wonderful takes such as:
Oppose: As mentioned by others, this separatism is a fiction fomented by Russia. DPR and LPR are a Russian military operation and all pretence to the contrary was dropped on 21 February 2022. —Legoless (talk) 11:19, 12 September 2022 (UTC)
Are there any alternatives for a less biased, objective take?
ecial Ed SocDem 😍
13d
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Day_of_Infamy_speech
Roosevelt's description of December 7, 1941, as "a date which will live in infamy" has been compared with November 22, 1963, the assassination of John F. Kennedy, September 11, 2001, the September 11 terrorist attacks, and January 6, 2021, the storming of the United States Capitol.
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Calamander9
13d
January 6 is far worse than any of those events. The country came within one of shake of the Qanon shamans staff from becoming a fascist dictatorship run by Donald DRUMPF and ADOLF Giuliani
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King_of_
Red Ted Redemption
13d
Interesting that they say "storming" in that article rather than the much more biased "attack" that the January 6th article has been hellbent on using. Wikipedia editors fiercely defend "attack" even though no one uses that term. Capitol Riot seems to be the most common, or Capitol Insurrection.
It's interesting to toggle between different languages on the Jan 6th page and see what words are used to describe that day. IIRC, usual suspects for languages democrats would know, like Spanish and French, say "attack," while the ideologues have been unable to convince German users to change from "storming" to "attack
to Pearl Harbor some eons ago. Saw one of the ships down there, and learned there were still bodies trapped inside. About 2,400 people died on the U.S. side.
I'm far from a patriot or military hypist, but it boils my piss every time some pile of dripping cunt jelly goes, "Yeah, actually, Jan 6th was comparable to Pearl Harbor."
As a comparison, it's either completely clueless, or completely sociopathic, and neither ought to have been allowed to leave Tumblr in the first place.
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Scerus
Politically Houseless ⛺
12d
Over 1,000 sailors died on the USS Arizona alone.
Those casualties almost come near the same amount who died in the costliest naval battles for the U.S. during the Pacific War (Savo Island, Guadalcanal, Samar) when multiple ships were lost.
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WikiSummarizerBot
Bot 🤖
13d
Day of Infamy speech
The "Day of Infamy" speech, sometimes referred to as just "The Infamy speech", was delivered by Franklin D. Roosevelt, the 32nd president of the United States, to a joint session of Congress on December 8, 1941. The previous day, the Empire of Japan attacked the United States military bases at the Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, and the Philippines, and declared war on the United States and the British Empire. The speech is known for its first line: "Yesterday, December 7, 1941—a date which will live in infamy. .
[ F.A.Q | Opt Out | Opt Out Of Subreddit | GitHub ] Downvote to remove | v1.5
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Mark_Bastard
No Gods / No Jannies
13d
🤮🤮🤮
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Ebalosus
Class Reductionist
13d
As a bit of an aside, I find it fucking wild how Wikipedia has gone from "place to go for a good primer on 'x'" to "the most trusted source of info on the net!" I mean, back when I was at college (2006-2008), you got in trouble for citing Wikipedia in your sources, for example.
Unfortunately big language wikipedias are have lots of entrenched power users with pet projects that do exactly what you observed. You could try contributing to a smaller language's wikipedia if you know any other languages, but that has its own host of problems since it can sometimes be even more cliquy since it's a smaller communities.
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Jaggedmallard26
Armchair Enthusiast 💺
13d
You found a powerautists pet page. You need to test the waters with small edits for any page you want to change because some unhinged i
You're welcome to contribute yourself and try to improve it
You're not "welcome" in any even vague sense of the word. To even begin to contribute without getting your shit immediately reverted, you need to get acquainted with the byzantine bureaucracy of editing. Then, you have to hope to god your chosen topic is not the private fiefdom of or more turboautists who will spend more time than you thought was humanly possibly fighting to keep exclusive control of it. If anything, new contributors are on average decidedly unwelcome, seen as clueless interlopers stepping on the pristine domain of whichever self-appointed priestly caste has taken over any given domain
The only editing I do with regularity on the site is deleting 95% of the "In pop culture" sections on any given page. Believe it or not, there are standards for what qualifies as being notable enough for inclusion, and a show/book/comic merely mentioning whatever the article is about is not good enough.
I get great pleasure from finding someone who has decided that their favorite piece of media needs more love and has consequently tried linking thousands of articles to it, and deleting them all. Unsurprisingly, it's the media that is most popular among the terminally online male crowd that sees this the most, so things like Rick and Morty, MCU films, random animes, MLP, etc. I feel like I'm doing my part to bully obsessive fans of these vapid, cookie-cutter media works.
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Jaggedmallard26
Armchair Enthusiast 💺
13d
It's the same thing that killed tvtropes, people just want to link their favourite anime or whatever to literally everything.
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Ebalosus
Class Reductionist
13d
Yeah what is Tvtropes’ favourite thing these days? Back in my day it was, well…take a look at my avatar and guess.
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Jaggedmallard26
Armchair Enthusiast 💺
13d
No idea, I stopped using it a while ago. Only time I use it now is when certain things have tvtropes acting as their main wiki.
feel ya on that, because even when there is a proper wiki, it’s often less informative than tvtropes.
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Jaggedmallard26
Armchair Enthusiast 💺
13d
Especially after proper noun Fandom killed wikia and discord made it so wiki editor types just spent all day wanking each other off on official servers.
I know the guy that's basically the power user for chess articles. He's definitely on the spectrum but to his credit he's actually a really nice guy and from what I gather is actually open to other people's contributions. Get someone with a similar level of obsession and without the friendliness and there's probably no chance for anyone else to edit that stuff
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Turgius_Lupus
Yugoloth Third Way
13d
I haven't had that happen but I stick to maintaining pages about State politicians that I personally despise.
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IAmZeBat
13d
i waste a lot of time writing on wikipedia, but not on politics or current events, mostly about science shit where i can actually source my information.
complaining about wikipedia’s coverage of current events is both stupid and pointless, seeing as wikipedia behaves in the same way as media when it comes to these sorts of things. don’t agree with it? who cares? find your own shitty source to back up your shitty opinion seeing as that’s exactly what you’re complaining about.
when it comes to current events, there’s a variety of sources flinging shit, saying you believe one more than the other without more than the fact that they confirm your own bias is just as annoying as what the people who disagree with you are doing. same side of the idiot coin.
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ageingrockstar
environmental recidivist
13d
complaining about wikipedia’s coverage of current events is both stupid and pointless
there isn't, and it's only going to get worse because of how mainstream media outlets are considered reliable sources. basically everything published in any "reputable" paper is considered reliable enough to cite on wikipedia
favourite Wikipedia take is that "Banderite" is an ethnic slur against pro-democracy Ukrainians. But honestly, at this rate there are few reliable sources of knowledge. We're at the stage where a person with doctorate in a very respected university tells me that life under Yeltsin wasn't bad that Russian people could be sold a second Yeltsin like figure, so it's pretty hard to trust something some fuck-off wrote on the net, as even best bibliography could be just filled with Zenz like people
We do live in a post-truth world since 2016 because no one, particularly politicians, lied before then.
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Dougtoss
☀️ You down with NDP? Yeah you know me 🇨🇦 9
13d
Books
9
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tschwib
Average NATO Fan 🪖:soy:
13d
Do you speak any languages besides English well enough to read a wikiarticle in it?
You could still translate them anyhow: https://ru-m-wikipedia-org.translate.goog/wiki/%D0%9B%D1%83%D0%B3%D0%B0%D0%BD%D1%81%D0%BA%D0%B0%D1%8F_%D0%9D%D0%B0%D1%80%D0%BE%D0%B4%D0%BD%D0%B0%D1%8F_%D0%A0%D0%B5%D1%81%D0%BF%D1%83%D0%B1%D0%BB%D0%B8%D0%BA%D0%B0?_x_tr_sl=auto&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=de&_x_tr_pto=wapp
Articles in different languages can sometimes be completely different and contain even much more info because there isn't some editor who refuses any changes on the English article.
death
American GaddaFOID 👧 Respecter
13d
Wikipedia has become so garbage about anything remotely political. Their article on the current Iranian protests discusses (or at least it did yesterday when I read it) the reaction of the US Treasury Department in the introduction section at the top of the page as if that's one of the most impactful aspects of the protests, rather then relegating it to an "International Reactions" section or something where it belongs.
Their articles on the Bolivian coup a couple years ago that deposed Evo Morales as well as the ones on the next elections that brought his party back to power were dogshit as well.
Then you have their science articles that are so technically dense that I as a chemist working in industry can't understand their articles on whatever process I'm looking up, to the point that when I read the cited scientific journal articles those are easier to understand
You should only use Wikipedia for scientific stuff or historical events so obscure or long ago that no-one can have a bias on the topic. These are often pretty well-sourced and unbiased.
Stay as far away as possible from topics that may be a little bit controversial though
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flagellant_crab
@
13d
Personally I love all the articles which are clearly an essay, a lot of articles on old worldview and folkloric stuff is like that, written by or perhaps plagiarized off some Masters student.
6
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Lazar_Taxon
All power to the broviets!
13d
A lot of the historical ones are just plagiarized from the 1911 Britannica (immediately spottable by their old-timey style).
You think the Donbass stuff is bad?
Franklin Credit Scandal is completely censored and dismissed by wikipedia as nonsense
Conservapedia’s page for the Treaty of Tripoli was once edited to say America is in EVERY way a Christian nation instead of the original text that said in NO way
Also they (used to?) have articles about how General Relativity is false because moral relativism is wrong lol
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Six-headed_dogma_man
No, Your Other Left
13d
how General Relativity is false because moral relativism is wrong lol
Awesome. That's not even wrong, it's behind it and to the side.
5
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60SecondSamosas
12d
people beggingly try to argue they aren't christian so muslims should stop enslaving them
probably not gonna exist for something as politically contentious and recent as this conflict, especially with this obnoxious "democracy dies in darkness" mentality that the libs have nowadays
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Anything from the last 100 years should generally be disregarded on there is my experience. Although now there are also woke departments that give students extra points for writing articles involving women and "non representative groups" in history. So don't know how long till the entire place is just the woke and the glowies.
Wikipedia became a neoliberal/establishment hugbox almost immediately after its' inception. I make a small annual donation to it because of the degree to which I use it for some subjects, but I would truthfully like to see it abolished. Like Twitter and Microsoft, it's a collaborating element of the FAANG cartel that are strangling the Internet.
——-Alternate history/fan fiction
rkvnKavod
Letting off steam from batshit intelligentsia
1y
but there is more interest in Marx among critics of literature, especially in university English departments
Oh, how I fucking wish.
AvianCinnamonCake
Right 🐷
1y
“The Democratic Party[2] (D) is a leftwing fascist totalitarian organization and one of two major political parties in the United States of America.[3] The Democratic party seeks to outlaw and smash any political opposition... It is currently controlled by international globalists whose principle aim is the overthrow of American democracy and free elections.”
hello epic department
43
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finna_wesome
Socialist 🚩
1y
Leninist vanguard party confirmed
1y
Is there a word for the thought process that creates Conservapedia?
What I mean is "Wikipedia is biased. That is bad. I will fix this...by creating my own hyper mega biased encyclopedia." instead of...
"Wikipedia is biased. That is bad. I will fix this...by creating my own unbiased encyclopedia."
Like I recognize bias can sneak in everywhere no matter how hard you try but Conservapedia doesn't try to be fair. Why do people have to be this dumb on purpose?
love the article on the 2020 election which they label “2020 US Colour revolution” where they have like the Wikipedia combat template and it’s literally “65,000 Democrat and Marxist Putsch supporters” v. “270,000,000 Americans”
Like way to make your enemy seem WAY MORE competent and Machiavellian then they actually are
All of the people who got banned from r/LateStageCapitalism for being open bigots to trans people and generally opposed to identity politics. And by "opposed to identity politics," we mean "never wanting to talk about minorities ever except to make fun of them." Their politics boil down to "Why can't I be a communist and say the N-word?" They mostly strawman intersectionality with liberal identity politics
Now, I'm not sure whether to be annoyed or amused at the paragraph above. Personally, I love this community here. I feel that it is one of the only places where we can have intelligent and amusing discourse about American politics without it being as heavily moderated as arr/politics, or as infuriating as many other subs such as arr/neoliberal and arr/conservative.
I used to think Rational Wiki was a decent site created to push back against ridiculous propaganda sites such as Conservapedia. But now, I think Rational Wiki is also putting a spin on what they dislike as much as Conservapedia does.
Any thoughts on the matter?
I'm a communist and I say 'neoliberal' all the time. That's the n-word they were talking about, right?
You're right, just late to the party. Rationalwiki has been woko haram nonsense since the early 2010s at least.
joke:
"Boko Haram" means, roughly, "books are forbidden", from the english world "book" and the arab word "haram". This is because boko haram opposes modern learning.
But with Rational Wiki, since they embrace the wokeness, we use the arab word "halal" instead. "Halal" means "permissible", as seen on foodstuffs that muslims can consume. It's also the opposite of haram. This makes "woko halal" funny not only because it still evokes the terrorist group but also because it actually makes sense.
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GoToSleepSheeple
1y
Thanks bro, this is fantastic, I am going to full on steal this joke.
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[deleted]
1y
Thanks, I had no idea about the etymology of "boko". I am dumb; you are clever.
EDIT: The etymology of "boko" was a fascinating point for me, but on further examination, it appears that the "book" theory is a false etymology. Boko is apparently an indigenous Hausa word meaning "fake" (a scam, a grift, a hoax, bogus). It was applied to Western learning as a pejorative in the early days of Nigerian colonization by Europeans, but it's unrelated etymologically to "book".
https://scholarworks.iu.edu/dspace/bitstream/handle/2022/20965/Etymology%20of%20Hausa%20Boko.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y#:~:text=Boko%20is%20not%20an%20English,deceit%2C%20or%20lack%20of%20authenticity.
wisconsin nationalist
1y
They were created to push back against conservapedia-Newton’s third law applies to American politics. Cons do one thing and the libs do the other.
Garbage definition- I think this sub is more anti-racist than the bigotry of low expectations, lack of agency, model minority crap that soaks the rest of political Reddit.
Disadvantaged people are just that: disadvantaged. Pull all people of the poverty they live in, get them food and housing stability, and there will be a remarkable turn around in this country.
reddit socialism
I agree with some criticism of idpol stuff but there's definitely a lot of racists in there trying to pretend that racism doesn't exist at all.
I got massively downvoted for saying that many conservatives were racist.
Antifa
:JosipBrozTito: Josip Broz Tito
1y
It's not the best place given how many liberals and right wingers are there, but it has been useful in introducing right wingers to socialism who might be open to left wing social and economic issues but are turned away by identity politics. Although there is a decent amount of reactionaries on there, overall they are still socialist and do bring up an important point about how socialists nowadays aren't as focused on economics
has been useful in introducing right wingers to socialism who might be open to left wing social and economic issues but are turned away by identity politics
Yeah, this was me back in college. I thought I leaned libertarian, then realized I agreed with a lot of economic leftist ideas through /r/stupidpol. Additionally, /r/stupidpol opened my eyes that there was so much more to leftism than idpol stuff. I started reading theory and now I'm a full blown leftist.
However, I unsubbed a while back; the influx of reactionaries and right-wingers completely ruined the sub. I would gander that 70% of the subs there aren't even left-wing, let alone Marxists. Additionally, I don't agree with completely disregarding idpol issues; LGBT and minority rights are important to respect and uphold. Though, I do wholly agree with OP's assessment of idpol in his/her first paragraph.
In all, maybe a year ago /r/stupidpol was alright, but as of right now it is irredeemable and should best be avoided for anybody that wants an actual, serious leftist outlook of the world today.
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tronalddumpresister
1y
I would gander that 70% of the subs there aren't even left-wing, let alone Marxists.
according to the most recent poll (almost 3000 respondents) they aren't. most of them are socdems-demsocs. communists came in 4th (which is still not bad).
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Chungus_Antifa
:JosipBrozTito: Josip Broz Tito
1y
I agree that it certainly is getting worse now that they've been getting a ton more right wingers lately, but overall I feel like the benefits outweigh the negatives, although the mods aren't doing enough to stop it from becoming a rightoid ragebait sub
1
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tronalddumpresister
1y
yeah most right-wingers who post very reactionary stuff get downvoted to oblivion and their answers hidden. those who don't flair up get noticed by mods who'll warn them. a lot of reactionary answers get deleted. so it's not all that bad. the problem is all these "populist" right-wingers tailoring their message to appeal to leftists (they go under the radar) or the ones being too comfortable and being like "yeah i don't agree with you guys but you're cool
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did you not see all those jan 6th posts full of comments claiming it was just a protest? stupidpol is not immune to the right vs left idiocracy. plenty of right wing idiots that are here only to rage against everything left.
1
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teamsprocket
Marxist-Mullenist 💦
1y
It was just a protest
groot
Trained Marxist
1y
Stop looking for things to get mad at
7
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Impossible_Pass_2933
Marxism 😎 Leninism
1y
Aren't you hatereading this sub constantly?
16
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I_am_a_groot
Trained Marxist
1y
Yes but I was here first and then the rightoids came
Carnead
Eco-socialist with suspicious anti-sjw sympathies
1y
They are right, communists should quote Marx rather than saying the N-word.
For example in Wage Labour and Capital : "A N.g.o is a N.g.o only in some conditions does he become a slave." /s
(Btw I'm surprised there's no call to cancel Marx yet, when he was clearly guilty of using his century language.)
I used to browse this subreddit, before I made an account, and I usually found it to be more in line with r/Drama and r/cumtown, rather than the supremely soyish as fuck r/LateStageCapitalism. Why would any stupidpoller post on that radlib central?
And by "opposed to identity politics," we mean "never wanting to talk about minorities ever except to make fun of them."
If it makes them feel any better, I probably make fun of white people more than I make fun of minorities nowadays. I'm kind of burned out after wasting my entire high school career on a certain filipino claymation forum, and making fun of white people requires more creativity, as there isn't much in the way of slurs or stereotypes for them.
we might be the reddit left's enfant terrible, but even with campus people I had rarely problems arguing for stupidpol talking points.
86Tiger
Libertarian Socialist 🥳
1y
About a month ago I watched a video on the public freakouts subreddit, it was a video of a female American olympian of Japanese ancestry being verbally hassled by this dude, who was very clearly a schizophrenic, it’s a long story. All the comments were about asian hate and Trump bla bla bla. My comment was to the effect of he shouldn’t be harassing anyone, but is this overt Asian hate or is this a schizophrenic guy living in his car? I got accused of being a Trump supporter and then someone went through my comment history and told me to go back to r/stupidpol with the other wack jobs 🥺 I often wondered how this subreddit is perceived through broader Reddit, unfortunately I think I know now, and it lessens my hope for humanity.
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Latter_Chicken_9160
Nationalist 😠
1y
I posted something to my local subreddit about making friends since I don’t have many connections (which I know is pathetic) but 90% of the people were telling me to get off of the internet and that I was a horrible person for posting and commenting on here and no wonder why you don’t have friends. People can be horrible sometimes I guess
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86Tiger
Libertarian Socialist 🥳
1y
GTFO!!! First of all, don’t be so hard on yourself, I think we live in the most alienating time in human history, nothing pathetic about you trying to do something to subvert that awful trend. Second, how fucking creepy are these people? I guess I can understand wanting to screen people you’re going to meet IRL, but why does having a nuanced opinion about our current culture and posting on one of the few subreddits that actual holds a real Left position make you a “horrible person”??
Fuck em man, a bunch of zealous woke NPC’s wouldn’t make for good friends anyway.
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c01dz3ra
35d
A lot of my friends who I thought were woke NPCs actually became capable of having healthy discussions with me once I started slightly breaking through the woke cult feelings and encouraging nuance. We agree on a lot of shit actually but nobody wants to be the first to say it
1
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Rodney_u_plonker
Left, Leftoid or Leftish ⬅️
1y
Neoliberal capitalism has completely wrecked all our social institutes leaving us isolated socially anxious wrecks.
Don't beat yourself up mate. Loneliness is a crises
33
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[deleted]
1y
Local subs are dogshit 99% of the time and their user base are made up of the kind of people who basically only exist in front of a computer/smartphone
25
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[deleted]
1y
One time I was in a bar in Philly and there was this large group of what had to be the most impressive collection of neckbeards and other socially inept people sitting at a table. My wife and I were getting to know the bartender and eventually asked what the deal with that table was. She responded “Oh, that’s the local Reddit meetup, they come in here about once a month”
I vowed to never meet anybody from a local sub ever after seeing that table.
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[deleted]
1y
Mine is filled with people bitching that the only good club in town is still operating and whining that traffic sucks while also voting against the mayoral candidate who wants to widen the roads
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Lewis-ly
Anarchist with butt problems
1y
Massive respect for being proactive and reaching out online dude, no matter what some anti social fuckwits said in response. Its part and parcel of the pressures of modern society that makes friendships even harder to maintain over distance and different priorities as you get older.
18
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fr3shfade
1y
Who don't love the 'read the post history' game
28
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InaneHierophant
Wrongthinking Thoughtcriminal
1y
I love it because usually they have to go back months to find something objectionable enough to throw in my face and say 'Gotcha', which they think is such a big brained move however considered I make like several paragraph sized posts a day it just illustrates what a sad sack of shit they are for spending what could be around an hour scrolling through word salad to 'beat' someone in an internet argument.
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[deleted]
1y
It’s actually really fun to go through theirs and dig up something even worse than what they found
10
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Klassenhass
moderately conservative communist
1y
I commented on r/communism a very communisty thing, and got banned. I was shocked, shocked i tell you! So i hit the mods up saying, "Hey i know for damn sure what I said was pro-communism. Why the ban?", and the mod replies, "we don't let r/stupidpol bigots in this sub"....
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AutuniteGlow
Unknown 👽
1y
Everyone on here has been banned from there. The NKVD were lenient compared to the mods there.
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Klassenhass
moderately conservative communist
1y
I believe it. I gotta imagine they have some bot that tells the mods what users post in an array of “bad subs” that the mods don’t like.
It’s honestly really shitty how much idpol has bled into “communism”. Too much worry about feelings, and safe spaces. I mean I get that these are arm chair commies that haven’t read anything; they just have a general idea of wage exploitation and that’s about it. Idpol is in stark opposition of communism
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NoApplication1655
Unknown 👽
1y
Despite being Canadian and never voting right of center, I also get accused of being a trump supporter. I think once it was because I was asking someone who was saying the US is currently a white supremacist country, why they would have such high numbers of immigrants from non white countries, and why the people in power wouldn’t raise minimum wage so lower class white men
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Carnead
Eco-socialist with suspicious anti-sjw sympathies
1y
Wikis tend to be dominated by wokies, it's like the two words don't sound the same for no reason.
Wokies are mostly privileged students having lot of time to edit obscure wiki articles and huge lots of confidence in their own intelligence and knowledge to do so, so it's rather inevitable any wiki end contaminated by them.
Compared to others Rationalwiki is showing some resistance, it seems there's a faction of contributors there protecting the pages directly linked to social justice ideology from them (see their reasonable take on prejudice+power for example). But everywhere else the wokies are worming their PoVs into the articles, especially on fringe topics like criticism of internet communities
Rational Wiki is basically Buzzfeed
Why can't you though? A communist shouldn't be afraid of words in the dictionary or have any truck with word-taboos. He should realize that the idea that saying a word makes you a bad person is a religious idea, not a rational one.
rat wiki https://youtu.be/LlOSdRMSG_k?t=39
post colonial misc holidays zelda
Why can't I be a communist and say the N-word?" is the paradoxical question of our age
Labor Organizer 🧑🏭
1y
Never and always can be red flags as sane people don't deal in absolutes. Also if you don't simp for their ideas they slander you online.
The extreme opposite of /r/ClimateSkeptics, this subreddit fetishizes the collapse of human civilization. Its focus on climate change is rather recent, as previously focused on economic or political collapse. They also tend to be very misanthropic.
🌖 Libertarian Socialist 4
1y
> But now, I think Rational Wiki is also putting a spin on what they dislike
All media has a spin. There is no such thing as objective media, no matter how hard one tries. Be critical in media consumption always, even on this subreddit. Criticise shit takes if you disagree, even if you are downvoted to hell for going against the grain. (Mild tangent but yeah ofc rational wiki has a spin, so does everything)
comm to hear this. Thank you comrade.
29
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vo0do0child
3y
Absolutely agree. I do think, though, that a lot of mainstream idpol lacks focus on class and class dynamics, and could use more emphasis on that. (It’s class warfare that gets shit done.)
28
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Kalel2319
3y
I don't know what anybody else generally reads, but I've always read idpol as economic and class focused.
But I suppose if you're a liberal and getting it from a BuzzFeed article you're opinions will be shallow nevertheless.
Yea, liberals don’t quite understand the problems, but they’re still trying to unify the working class even if they don’t quite think about it like that
Then again, the right wing reactionaries take allies from all walks, they don't concern themselves with how well read their frog memeing assholes are, they widen the tent to include all hatred and anger.
So we should not really criticize those who aren't as well educated on the intersection of class and race if they are willing to acknowledge the problem to begin with.
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vo0do0child
3y
Yep I agree. Don’t mean to criticise anyone on the broad left just making the observation.
5
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[deleted]
3y
Yea, liberals don’t quite understand the problems, but they’re still trying to unify the working class even if they don’t quite think about it like that
colonize holiday s misc
Jewish organizations will be formed for educational purposes so as not to lose the history. Though I do think capitalistic competition is one of the main driver of supremist thinking and without capitalism it should fall away faster then the state. As to a Jewish state, I think it should have been formed in Europe in traditional areas where Yiddish was and is spoken. Or possibly in Jerusalem as long as they worked with the Native Palestinians to form a workers republic with a strong Jewish and Palestinian identity.
https://www.reddit.com/r/stupidpol/comments/r6tlb6/why_are_liberals_pretending_like_nobody_learns/
https://www.reddit.com/r/stupidpol/comments/sf6a2m/new_definition_of_racism_just_dropped/
dont even know what racism is
Neolib but i appreciate class-based politics 🏦:zoomer:
263d
No, you see, at that moment, they briefly but perceptibly stop being a POC, and then switch back.
12
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They had to narrow the definition of racism because it became untenable to claim that what they advocate for wasn’t racist.
Cizox
Unknown 👽
263d
Geez I remember when I used to think that. It was back in 2013 with that meme screenshot of someone’s trigger warning being “Rocket Power”, and the girl with the “die cis scum” tattoo while holding the baseball bat. I never would’ve imagined that it really did escape Tumblr and go on to plague an entire generation.
8
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goodcleanchristianfu
Libtard :soy:
263d
People arguing these things will keep getting fucked in elections and then blame the fact that they lost on the rest of the country being too bigoted.
72
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[deleted]
263d
It does stop eventually, but it doesn’t “level out” so to speak. The pendulum swings in the opposite direction. Frankly, that’s gonna look a lot worse than what we have now
Cizox
Unknown 👽
263d
Geez I remember when I used to think that. It was back in 2013 with that meme screenshot of someone’s trigger warning being “Rocket Power”, and the girl with the “die cis scum” tattoo while holding the baseball bat. I never would’ve imagined that it really did escape Tumblr and go on to plague an entire generation.
8
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goodcleanchristianfu
Libtard :soy:
263d
People arguing these things will keep getting fucked in elections and then blame the fact that they lost on the rest of the country being too bigoted.
72
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[deleted]
263d
It does stop eventually, but it doesn’t “level out” so to speak. The pendulum swings in the opposite direction. Frankly, that’s gonna look a lot worse than what we have now
NATO-loving Radical Feminist
263d
I've said it a thousand times - define the terms and you win the debate.
People need to start pushing back hard, and very publicly, against the woke redefinition of everything from "racism" and "woman" to "equity" and "sex".
It's getting to the point where they're starting to win arguments by simply saying "go look it up in the dictionary".
sudomakesandwich
Incel/MRA :soy:
263d
add "transphobia" to that list
because it doesn't sound so sinister if you can get people to admit that "transphobia" = MtF shouldn't fight women in combat sports without disclosing that they transitioned
Especially with the Harvard admission casing decision come soon.
Centre-Leftist Doomer
263d
So between this revisionism, attempts by some American institutions to massage the meaning of “people of colour” to no longer include Asians and the mental gymnastics that take place in some circles whenever a “poc” beats the shit out of an Asian person for no reason in order to blame it on “white supremacy”, where exactly do Asians stand in this worldview?
Do Asians have enough poc-ness to be considered victims of racism, whist any racial prejudice that an Asian person may possess is sanitised by virtue of them being a “poc” and therefore not racist?
Or are Asians “white adjacent” enough that their place on the “socially constructed racial hierarchy”, reverses these conditions, rendering racial prejudices against Asians not racist, while any racial prejudice held by an Asian person now carries the mark of “racist”?
Or will every incident involving racial prejudices where a white person isn’t involved have to be judged on a case by case basis, with perpetrator and victim having to play a game of “I’ll show you my poc-ness if you show me yours” to figure out where each person sits on the “socially constructed racial hierarchy” and determine whether someone has done a racism or not?
Yugoloth Third Way
263d
Well, most White People are Haplogroup R1b (also found in Asia and Central Africa(?)) which comes out of what many consider to be Asia, so do the math. Some Woke academics have published claims that the Yamnaya (Indo Europeans) were the most genocidal and murderous cultural appropriating people on earth to establish that inherited original sin thing, while also claiming modern European populations are not descended from its original inhabitants.
kool_guy_69
fruit juice drinker
263d
TIL Basques are the only good white people.
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Turgius_Lupus
Yugoloth Third Way
263d
Sorry, Basques are majority R1b also. Only those with Haplogroup I are good White people
Any of them wh*te? What about Armenians, are they PoC or what is going on there?
4
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Turgius_Lupus
Yugoloth Third Way
263d
Apparently. Though the largest population percentage per limited testing is in Bosnia-Hergozivna, Croatia, The Russian Republic of Dagestan and Denmark.
Sorry, Armenians are majority R1b also, Speak what is considered a Indo-European Language and some theorize they occupy the Proto Indo Europeans heartland before they moved into the Pontic Steps which makes them potentially Ur Evil Patriarchal White People. But then again the population of Cameroon is estimated to be around 90 percent R1b as well.
5
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kool_guy_69
fruit juice drinker
262d
According to her interpretations, gynocentric (or matristic) societies were peaceful, honored women, and espoused economic equality.[citation needed]
[citation needed]
Comedy gold
Because the Communists wouldn't take her feminist theories seriously when she kept lamenting about how the matrifocal pre-indoeuropean society of Old Europe was destroyed when the patriarchy rode in on horseback.
So the plot of every 80’s barbarian movie? Side note: check out deathstalker. It’s an incredible piece of trash.
Socialist with programmer characteristics 🇨🇳
263d
Asians are not brown enough? Current Cold War? Their definition is crazy and American AF. They must include racial stuff in anything. In Europe we know you can be racist between white people
12
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PUBLIQclopAccountant
Sex Work Advocate (John) 👔
263d
As it turns out, Orientals were the true master race all along.
7
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TheSingulatarian
Politically Houseless ⛺
263d
https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202209/1275487.shtml
https://thegrayzone.com/2019/08/17/hong-kong-protest-washington-nativism-violence/
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2019/08/20/boris-johnson-needs-take-lefts-false-prophets-hope/
https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202209/1274700.shtml
https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202104/1220314.shtml
http://www.4pt.su/en/content/modernization-without-westernization
Haz anti west
1)common cause with nationalists and populists.
“Masters and Vance are different from Hawley and Cruz,” Chafkin writes; the former two are “extensions” of Thiel.
This New Right is heavily populated by people with graduate degrees, At one end are the NatCons, post-liberals, and traditionalist figures like Benedict Option author Rod Dreher, who envision a conservatism reinvigorated by an embrace of localist values, religious identity, and an active role for the state in promoting everything from marriage to environmental conservation.
But there’s also a highly online set of Substack writers, podcasters, and anonymous Twitter posters—“our true intellectual elite,” as one podcaster describes them. This group encompasses everyone from rich crypto bros and tech executives to back-to-the-landers to disaffected members of the American intellectual class, like Up in the Air author Walter Kirn, whose fulminations against groupthink and techno-authoritarianism have made him an unlikely champion to the dissident right and heterodox fringe.
that individualist liberal ideology, increasingly bureaucratic governments, and big tech are all combining into a world that is at once tyrannical, chaotic, and devoid of the systems of value and morality that give human life richness and meaning—as Blake M
“fractious family of dissenters”“a somewhat new, loose coalition of people whose major concern is that we not end up in a top-down controlled state.”
He told me he didn’t consider himself right wing and found some of the antidemocratic ideas he heard expressed in this sphere to be “personally chilling.” a zone of experimentation and free expression of a kind that was now closed off in America’s liberal mainstream. “They seem to want a war,” he said. “The last thing I want is some kind of definitive ideological war which leaves out the heterodox, complicated, and almost naively open spirit of American politics.”
It is a bunch of people who believe that the system that organizes our society and government, which most of us think of as normal, is actually bizarre and insane. Which naturally makes them look bizarre and insane to people who think this system is normal
You’ll hear these people talk about our globalized consumerist society as “clown world.”
You’ll often hear the worldview expressed by our media and intellectual class described as “the matrix” or the “Ministry of Truth,” as Thiel described it in his opening keynote speech to NatCon.
It can be confusing to turn on something like the influential underground podcast Good Ol Boyz and hear a figure like Anton talk to two autodidact Southern gamers about the makeup of the regime, if only because most people reading this probably don’t think of America as the kind of place that has a regime at all. But that’s because, as many people in this world would argue, we’ve been so effectively propagandized that we can’t see how the system of power around us really works. This is an idea that the people who work in our systems of power are so obtuse that they can’t even see that they’re part of a conspiracy.
“The fundamental premise of liberalism,” Yarvin told me, “is that there is this inexorable march toward progress. I disagree with that premise.” He believes that this premise underpins a massive framework of power. “My job,” as he puts it, “is to wake people up from the Truman Show.”
with poenlightenment political aims of post enlightenment
Freedom from’ is the most disgusting formula of slavery, inasmuch as it tempts man to an insurrection against God, against traditional values, against the moral and spiritual foundations of his people and his culture … the metaphysical meaning of liberalism and its fateful victory becomes known in the right measure and the right proportions. Only tearing it out by its roots can defeat this evil, and I do not exclude that such a victory will necessitate erasing from the face of the Earth those spiritual and physical halos from which arose the global heresy, which insists that ‘man is the measure of all things’.[3]
This friend has now made a bunch of money in crypto, works on a project Yarvin helped launch to build a decentralized internet, and lives hours out into the desert in Utah, where he’ll occasionally call in to New Right–ish podcasts.
Yarvin has a pretty condescending view of the mainstream media: “They’re just predators,” he has said, who have to make a living attacking people like him. “They just need to eat.” He doesn’t usually deal with mainstream magazines and wrote that he’d been “ambushed” at the last NatCon, in 2019, by a reporter for Harper’s—where I also write—who made him out to be a bit of a loon and predicted that the NatCons’ populist program would soon be “stripped of its parts” by the corporate-minded Republican establishment.
he’d gone to read poetry in New York recently, at the Thiel-funded NPC fest. “A bunch of lit kids showed up,” he said, grinning. I had grown into adulthood in the New York lit-kid world; even a few years ago, there was no question that anything like this could have happened. But now Yarvin is a cult hero to many in the ultrahip crowd that you’ll often hear referred to as the “downtown scene.” “I don’t even think antifa bothered showing up,” Yarvin said. “What would they do? It was an art party.”
As Moldbug, Yarvin wrote about race-based IQ differences, and in an early post, titled “Why I Am Not a White Nationalist,” he defended reading and linking to white nationalist writing. He told me he’d pursued those early writings in a spirit of “open inquiry,” though Yarvin also openly acknowledged in the post that some of his readers seemed to be white nationalists. Some of Yarvin’s writing from then is so radically right wing that it almost has to be read to be believed, like the time he critiqued the attacks by the Norwegian far-right terrorist Anders Behring Breivik—who killed 77 people, including dozens of children at a youth camp—not on the grounds that terrorism is wrong but because the killings wouldn’t do anything effective to overthrow what Yarvin called Norway’s “communist” government. He argued that Nelson Mandela, once head of the military wing of the African National Congress, had endorsed terror tactics and political murder against opponents, and said anyone who claimed “St. Mandela” was more innocent than Breivik might have “a mother you’d like to fuck.”
“say anything unnecessarily controversial, or go out of my way to be provocative for no reason.” Many liberals who hear him talk would probably question how strictly he follows this rule, but even in his Moldbug days, most of his controversial writings were couched in thickets of irony and metaphor, a mode of speech that younger podcasters and Twitter personalities on the highly online right have adopted—a way to avoid getting kicked off tech platforms or having their words quoted by liberal journalists.
He considers himself a reactionary, not just a conservative—he thinks it is impossible for an Ivy League–educated person to really be a conservative. He has consistently argued that conservatives waste their time and political energy on fights over issues like gay marriage or critical race theory, because liberal ideology holds sway in the important institutions of prestige media and academia—an intertwined nexus he calls “the Cathedral.” He developed a theory to explain the fact that America has lost its so-called state capacity, his explanation for why it so often seems that it is not actually capable of governing anymore: The power of the executive branch has slowly devolved to an oligarchy of the educated who care more about competing for status within the system than they do about America’s national interest.
 One man raised his hand to ask how Masters planned to DRAIN THE SWAMP. He gave me a sly look. “Well, one of my friends has this acronym he calls RAGE,” he said. “Retire All Government Employees.”
Someone like me who has made a career of writing about militias and extremist groups might go about my work thinking that all I do is try to tell important stories and honestly describe political upheaval. But within the Cathedral, the best way for me to get big assignments and win attention is to identify and attack what seem like threats against the established order, which includes nationalists, antigovernment types, or people who refuse to obey the opinions of the Cathedral’s experts on issues like vaccine mandates, in as alarming a way as I possibly can. This cycle becomes self-reinforcing and has been sent into hyperdrive by Twitter and Facebook, because the stuff that compels people to click on articles or share clips of a professor tends to affirm their worldview, or frighten them, or both at the same time. The more attention you gain in the Cathedral system, the more you can influence opinion and government policy. Journalists and academics and thinkers of any kind now live in a desperate race for attention—and in Yarvin’s view, this is all really a never-ending bid for influence, serving the interests of our oligarchical regime. So I may think I write for a living. But to Yarvin, what I actually do is more like a weird combination of intelligence-gathering and propagandizing. Which is why no one I was talking to at NatCon really thought it would be possible for me to write a fair piece about them.
To truly be red-pilled, you have to understand the workings of the Cathedral. And the way conservatives can actually win in America, he has argued, is for a Caesar-like figure to take power back from this devolved oligarchy and replace it with a monarchical regime run like a start-up. As early as 2012, he proposed the acronym RAGE—Retire All Government Employees—as a shorthand for a first step in the overthrow of the American “regime.” What we needed, Yarvin thought, was a “national CEO, [or] what’s called a dictator.” Yarvin now shies away from the word dictator and seems to be trying to promote a friendlier face of authoritarianism as the solution to our political warfare: “If you’re going to have a monarchy, it has to be a monarchy of everyone,” he said.
prominent figures like Thiel and Balaji Srinivasan, formerly the CTO of Coinbase, and that it was possible for an intellectual fringe to “seize key positions of authority and power” and “eventually bring large numbers of people around,” just as the Koch brothers once had with their pro-business libertarianism, a position that Thiel was quickly moving away from.
The Red Scare hosts both started out as diffident socialists, back when it was still possible to think that socialism represented an edgy political stance, in the little interlocking spheres of America’s media and political set. One of them, Nekrasova, actually became known in media circles for a clip that went megaviral in 2018, when she cut dead a reporter for Alex Jones’s Infowars trying to ambush Bernie Sanders supporters at a festival in Austin. “I just want people to have health care, honey,” she deadpanned. “You people have, like, worms in your brains. Honestly.”
Fast-forward to November 2021, and Nekrasova and her cohost Anna Khachiyan were posting photos of themselves with Jones’s arms wrapped around them under an evening Texas sun. Nekrasova now has a role on HBO’s Succession, playing a P.R. rep working with Kendall Roy; the show itself set “right-wing Twitter”—a sphere heavily populated by 20-somethings who work in tech or politics and seem to disproportionately live in D.C. and Miami—alight with delight when an episode in the latest season included a litany of key New Right phrases such as “integralist” and “Medicare for all, abortions for none.”
The Red Scare hosts are only the best-known representatives of a fashionable dissident-y subculture, centered in but not exclusive to downtown Manhattan. “Everyone dresses like a duck hunter now,” a bewildered friend of mine texted recently. People use the derisive term “bugman” to describe liberal men who lack tangible life skills like fixing trucks or growing food—guys who could end up spending their lives behind the bug-eyed screen of a V.R. headset. Women wear clothes from Brandy Melville, which you can hear described ironically as fashionwear for girls with “fascist leanings,” and which named one of its lines after John Galt, the hero of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. People are converting to Catholicism. “It’s a good thing I have a girlfriend,” my friend texted. “Because casual sex is out.
Yarvin has mused that the liberal regime will begin to fall when the “cool kids” start to abandon its values and worldview. There are signs that this may be happening, though not all the so-called cool kids involved in this vibe shift would want to be colored as the vanguard in a world historical rebellion against the global order.
“I’m not, like, into politics,” the writer Honor Levy, a Catholic convert and Bennington grad, told me when I called her. “I just want to have a family someday.”
Levy, who was a leftist recently enough that she cried when it became clear that Bernie Sanders wouldn’t be the Democratic presidential nominee, is friendly with Yarvin and has had him on the podcast she cohosts, Wet Brain—“Yeah, the Cathedral and blah blah,” she said when we got to talking about political media. But she said she’d never even heard of J.D. Vance or Blake Masters.
Levy is an It girl in a downtown Manhattan scene—The New Yorker has published her fiction; she is named in a New York Times story that tries to describe that scene—where right-wing politics have become an aesthetic pose that mingles strangely with an earnest search for moral grounding. “Until like a year and a half ago I didn’t believe good and evil existed,” she told me, later adding: “But I’m not in a state of grace, I shouldn’t be talking.” I asked if she would take money from Thiel and she cheerily said, “Of course!” She also described her cohort as a bunch of “libertines,” and on her podcast you can get a window into a world of people who enjoy a mind-bendingly ironic thrill by tut-tutting each other for missing church or having premarital sex. “Most of the girls downtown are normal, but they’ll wear a Trump hat as an accessory,” she said. The ones deep into the online scene, she said, “want to be like Leni Riefen
doall these things (expand morality post left) politics tech holidays fashion etc
a frank colonizer
sam harris sbnr expand fuse w xianity
While not strictly in the purview of Afro-pessimism, it’s important to note the ways that subject-oriented movements have included/excluded various identities over time—e.g., both discursively and explicitly, worker’s movements mostly omitted women, and women’s movements mostly omitted trans people. The point is not to decry exclusion, but to encourage moving destructively through and out of all such gross limitations to being.
It is significant to note that my engagement with Afro-pessimism is as a non-Black person—none of my words should be taken as representative of it. Being non-Black, I am structurally positioned against Blackness and thus to feel a world built completely against you is something that is ultimately incomprehensible to me. My interest in Afro-pessimism comes not as an empathetic ally—as that position o
Afro pessimism is a subsection of antiblackness that says a few things
That blackness is ontological — this means that the black body will always be in the position of the slave/not whiteness
That means there isn’t any hope for social movement for members of the black body
Black bodies are considered marked and they’re constantly targeted by systems of oppression and hierarchy
Any form of hope is considered as cruel optimism and is another form of psychological structural oppression
There is another “subsection” of Afropessimism called Black Nihilism
It’s pretty similar except the alternatives tend to revolve more around the black body finding some method to remove themselves from the sociopolitical landscape
Actually Warren's argument is more hopeful than Wilderson's insofar as he advocates for black withdrawal from POLITICAL entities but believes interpersonal coalitions can be formed between black people, a stark contrast to Wilderson's complete rejection of any form of black relationships.
Bodies that aren’t white
Some nitpicking: it's not about being "not white" but about being "black." The sort of theorizing that at least Wilderson uses is one where it is not so much a black/white binary but a black/non-black binary. This is actually a foundational fact of the theory which follows from the ontology thesis.
This minor point actually has significant ramifications in actual debate. Namely, debates on whether or not white/non-black debaters can read afropessimism (Rashad Evans DA). A stance which focuses the black/white binary (which is an INCORRECT reading) would imply that there is no contradiction for non-black/non-white debaters to read afropessmism. However, when viewed from the black/non-black binary, this is not acceptable.
It is extremely important to be able to quickly understand these sorts of minutiae because not doing so leads to extremely awful conflations of antiblackness/afropess arguments to just "racism bad."
linuspauling101
3y
This is correct but only in a reductionist standpoint (see below). Afro-pessimism is a theory of orientation rather than Anti-Blackness which is a structural condition in the world that means Black bodies are positioned in absolution negation to Civil Society. (like black anarchism)
Wilderson makes a clear distinction between Anti-Black Racism and Anti-Blackness.. Blacks are the non white-human that allows White Humanity and non-black sub-humans to gain their coherence. This is why Patterson says Social Death is the only way to read Chattel Slavery because labor in relation to slavery can apply to other conditions i.e. Sports Teams and certain cultures of Patriarchy that don't explain the unique condition of Blacks within slavery
The way I understand it:
Blackness has a negated ontology.
From an european tradition:
The black person (the black experience/the black phenomenology) does not exist in Hegel or Kant. The black experience does not exist in the canon of Existentialisms, it does not have the capacity to imagine the black experience.
Blackness is born always already objectified. Blackness is born into slavery. Blackness is born colonized. The blackness does not have the privilege of being born into a world without the white gaze. The white gaze creates the ontology/phenomenology/consciousness of the black person. How to walk/act/talk, Blackness is thought of itself in third person.
If white is the human, then black is the opposite of the human.
Blackness in european philosophy is frozen in a static identity only used to prop up whiteness.
In this sense the "humanist" project is a racist project.
I found this episode helpful in understanding Afro-pessimism https://alwaysalreadypodcast.wordpress.com/2016/10/04/ep-42-frantz-fanon-black-skin-white-masks/
There is also this:
https://alwaysalreadypodcast.wordpress.com/2015/07/22/ep-26-afro-pessimism-and-black-optimism
Why hasn't Zizek written anything on Afro-Pessimism? It could be due to it being a more recent American academic development, and Zizek's interests are usually more European. However, because Afro-pessimism often combines psychoanalysis (following Fanon) and Marxism, it seems somewhat symptomatic that anti-emphasis-on-identity-politics Marxists like Zizek would ignore the field. Or maybe I have missed some polemic? I would love to hear his comments on it.
FMI: http://sfbay-anarchists.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/frank-b-wilderson-iii-were-trying-to-destroy-the-world-antiblackness-police-violence-after-ferguson.pdf
This quotation is especially revealing:
" [White activists] wouldn’t say, ‘Well you know, there’s some good capitalists and some bad capitalists.’ They would say, ‘the capitalist as a category has to be destroyed’. What freaks them out about an analysis of anti-Blackness is that this applies to the category of the Human, which means that they have to be destroyed regardless of their performance, or of their morality, and that they occupy a place of power that is completely unethical, regardless of what they do. And they’re not going to do that. Because what are they trying to do? They’re trying to build a better world. What are we trying to do? We’re trying to destroy the world. Two irreconcilable projects." --Frank Wilderson
I would contest that Marxists wanting to destroy capitalists as a class necessarily implies killing all capitalists, rather it more means the erasure of classes as such, by whatever means. But the point about irreconcilability at the end still stands.
tl;dr: Afro-pessimist identity politics take antiblackness to be just as, if not more, central of a social antagonism as class exploitation/debt domination, and furthermore find class struggle and race struggle to be "irreconcilable projects;" I'm wondering why Zizek hasn't seemed to address this challenge
Ok, so first off you're right when you say, "From my reading of you, your interpretation of "invisibility" as it applies to Blackness takes this as a condition inextricably tied to Blackness and something that cannot be solved within the logic of civil society." I am always saying that, were Fanon here today, he would dispense with the word "colonialism" and utilize the word "slavery"'; also, he would be able to see the fundamental difference in his ow work: that difference being between the assumptive logic of Black Skin, White Masks (which, in my view is a genuinely Afro-Pessimist text (even though AP wasn't around then) and The Wretched of the Earth, which is a post-colonial text. Mind you, I would not the latter text out the window; it's extremely valuable; it just is not as predicated on social death as is his first book.
Now, the second part of your question deals with lines of flight, inward emancipation, interpersonal meaning-making etc. Look, I'm all for that (I'm a poet, a fiction writer, and I love jazz); but I wouldn't send my ships to war on that. I think Fred Moten is one the smartest people I have ever met, and I count him as a friend. So, there is no flame war between us. We love each other. And, furthermore, he is pure philosopher, whereas I am a critical theorist and a polemicist. That said, I still think an aesthetic strategy of liberation does an end run around the central issue: structural violence. I you (my high school or college interlocutors) do nothing else in your lifetime, I encourage you to develop a meta-critique of paradigmatic violence. It takes an ocean of violence to shift reality from one paradigm to the next (i.e. the shift from feudalism to capitalism; or the instantiation of the a slavocracy). As intellectuals you owe it to yourselves to become experts/meta-critics of structural violence. What is the difference between the structure of violence that elaborates and maintains capitalism and the structure of violence that elaborates and maintains social death? The answer to this question should roll smoothly off your tongues. the reason Blacks are not workers, not natives, and not gendered subjects is because the structural violence that subjugates workers, natives, and gendered subjects is contingent violence; that is to say, violence that acts upon a stimuli—some form of real or imagined transgression on the part of the subjugated population. By way of contrast, the violence that positions and elaborates Blacks is not contingent; it is necessary and gratuitous. Violence against Black people is prelogical; that is to say, not in service to a coherent concept, like the accumulation of surplus value or the occupation of land. A metacritique of violence is at the core of Afro-Pessimist theorization; if you become articulate in your capacity to explain structural violence you will become that much better as a revolutionary thinker, theorist, and political organizer.
EDIT
t BLM shouldn’t need to always rely on whites in power to give them legitimacy by supporting them since BLM needing whites to support them is white saviorism and white ethnocentrism and BLM is against white saviorism and white ethnocentrism
Elizabeth Bruenig on influencing Left Millennials to embrace pro-life politics. She did her part to abolish women's reproductive rights.
is significant to note that my engagement with Afro-pessimism is as a non-Black person—none of my words should be taken as representative of it. Being non-Black, I am structurally positioned against Blackness and thus to feel a world built completely against you is something that is ultimately incomprehensible to me. My interest in Afro-pessimism comes not as an empathetic ally—as that position only reinforces the racial hierarchy—but as an enemy of whiteness (and as someone who lovingly fights alongside friends). I see Afro-pessimism offering a framework to not only understand anti-Blackness but to also better comprehend whiteness. Racial categories exist relative to one another— obviously in grossly asymmetrical ways—and so understanding whiteness entails understanding anti-Blackness.
At the same time it is important to recognize whiteness as more than just an identity that one can simply abandon. The idea of being a traitor to one’s race is important when non-Black but it is not enough. Whiteness is in the mortar that has constructed this world—which is of course supplemented by settler colonialism, patriarchy, heterosexuality, and so on. This is to say that the foundations and structures of the world we live in are inherently anti-Black; it is not only individuals and old fashioned racists that perpetuate anti-Blackness. Thus to maintain and reform the systems around us is to uphold whiteness, and to uphold or positively identify with whiteness will always be anti-Black.
It is an ongoing struggle experimenting with what it means to abolish whiteness and anti-Blackness, but it certainly involves listening to and learning from those whose lives are defined by systematic exclusion and murder. Afro-pessimism offers a fundamental challenge to concepts of race and racism and provides a framework through which anyone, including non- Black people, might understand their position in society and the struggles for a different world
upon the erudite work of Orlando Patterson, is a reoriented
understanding of the composition of slavery: instead of being defined as a relation of (forced) labor, it is more accurately thought of as a relation of property. The slave is objectified in such a way that they are legally made an object (a commodity) to be used and exchanged. It is not just their labor-power that is commodified—as with the worker—but their very being. As such, they are not recognized as a social subject and are thus precluded from the category of “human”—inclusion in humanity being predicated on social recognition, volition, subjecthood, and the valuation of life.
The slave, as an object, is socially dead, which means they are: 1) open to gratuitous violence, as opposed to violence contingent upon some transgression or crime; 2) natally alienated, their ties of birth not recognized and familial structures intentionally broken apart; and 3) generally dishonored, or disgraced before any thought or action is considered.
The social death of the slave goes to the very level of their being, defining their ontology. Thus, according to Afro-pessimism, the slave experiences their “slaveness” ontologically, as a “being for the captor,”3 not as an oppressed subject, who experiences exploitation and alienation, but as an object of accumulation and fungibility (exchangeability).
After the “nonevent of emancipation,”4 slavery did not simply give way to freedom. Instead, the legal disavowal of ownership reorganized domination and the former slave became the racialized Black “subject,” whose position was marked epidermally, per Frantz Fanon.5 What followed was a profound entrenchment of the concept of race, both psychically and juridically. Formally, the Black subject was no longer a slave, but
2. Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study.
3. See in this volume Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe.”
4. See in this volume Hartman, “The Burdened Individuality of
Freedom.”
5. Black Skin, White Masks.
introduction 9
the same formative relation of structural violence that maintained slavery remained—upheld explicitly by the police (former slave catchers) and white supremacy generally—hence preserving the equation that Black equals socially dead. Just as wanton violence was a constituent element of slavery, so it is to Blackness. Given the ongoing accumulation of Black death at the hands of the police—even despite increased visibility in recent years—it becomes apparent that a Black person on the street today faces open vulnerability to violence just as the slave did on the plantation. That there has recently been such an increase in media coverage and yet little decrease in murder reveals the ease with which anti-Black violence can be ignored by white society; at the same time this reveals that when one is Black one needn’t do anything to be targeted, as Blackness itself is criminalized
With this understanding of slavery and Blackness, Afro-pessimism makes a critical shift in focus by moving away from the Black/ white binary and reframing it as Black/non-Black, in order to deemphasize the status of whiteness and to center analysis, rather, on the anti-Black foundations of race and modern society. In other words, “it is racial blackness as a necessary condition for enslavement that matters most, rather than whiteness as a sufficient condition for freedom.”6 As a result, it is Blackness, and more specifically anti-Blackness, that gives coherence to categories of non-Black—white, worker, gay, i.e., “human.” Categories of non-Black must establish their boundaries for inclusion in a group (humanity) by having a recognizable self within. There must also, consequently, be an outside to each group, and, as with the concept of humanity, it is Blackness that is without; it is Blackness that is the dark matter surrounding and holding together the categories of non-Black. Experientially, subjects, even Black ones, can obviously find themselves with any myriad identities, but ontologically Blackness is still violently excluded from even the meager scraps given when recognized.
The distinction that Afro-pessimism makes is important because it problematizes any positive affirmation of identity7—as non-
6. Sexton, “People-of-Color-Blindness: Notes on the Afterlife of Slavery.”
7. This doesn’t altogether eliminate the possibilities for organizing
10 editors’
Black categories are defined against the Blackness they are not, this relation of race indirectly (and directly, e.g., white teens’ racist snapchats) sustains anti-Blackness by producing and sustaining racialized categories. Stated otherwise, “the violence of anti- blackness produces black existence; there is no prior positive blackness that could be potentially appropriated. Black existence is simultaneously produced and negated by racial domination, both as presupposition and consequence. Affirmation of blackness proves to be impossible without simultaneously affirming the violence that structures black subjectivity itself.”8
Afro-pessimism departs with this understanding a
Afro-pessimism departs with this understanding and illuminates the limits and failures of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements, such as their reformist ideologies concerning progress and their disastrous integration with bureaucratic machinery. If, as Afro-pessimism shows, it is not possible to affirm Blackness itself without at the same time affirming anti-Black violence, then the attempts at recognition and inclusion in society will only ever result in further social and real death. Individuals can of course achieve some status in society through “structural adjustment”9 (i.e., a kind of “whitening” effect), as has been superficially confirmed, but Blackness as a racialized category remains the object of gratuitous, constituent violence—as demonstrated by police murders, mass incarceration, urban planning, and surveillance (from cointelpro to special security codes at stores to indicate when Black customers enter). As Blackness is negated by the relations and structures of society, Afro-pessimism posits that the only way out is to negate that negation
The challenges Afro-pessimism poses to the affirmation of Blackness extend to other identities as well and problematize identity-based politics. The efforts, on the part of such a
around identities. There are very real reasons why this is often necessary and groups are experimenting with ways of building autonomy that are also anti-essentialist and recognize the heterogeneity of supposedly static categories. One example is a negative affirmation of identity (the exclusion of cis men) in order to prevent any positive affirmation of another (a static notion of “womanhood”). See LIES, especially Vol. II.
8. R.L., “Wanderings of the Slave: Black Life and Social Death.”
9. Wilderson, Red, White & Black.
This reader is intended to be an introduction to the theory called Afro-pessimism. Collected in this volume are articles spanning three decades of thought, with topics ranging from police violence, the labor of Black women, and the slave’s transformation following emancipation, to the struggles of the Black Liberation Army and elements of anti-Blackness in Indigenous struggles for sovereignty. Although the authors use differing methods of analysis, they all approach them with a shared theoretical understanding of slavery, race, and the totality of anti-Blackness; it is this shared understanding that has been called Afro-pessimism. Importantly though, rather than a fixed ideology, Afro-pessimism is better thought of as a theoretical lens for situating relations of power, at the level of the political and the libidinal.1 Afro-pessimism, in many ways, picks up the critiques started by Black revolutionaries in the 1960s and 70s, elaborating their short-comings and addressing their failures. While we don’t intend to explicate at great length the theory of Afro-pessimism here—this will be done by the articles—it may be helpful to start with a brief overview to give those readers without a context some footing with which to go forward.
∆
1. Libidinal economy – the economy, or distribution and arrangement, of desire and identification, of energies, concerns, points of attention, anxieties, pleasures, appetites, revulsions, and phobias—the whole structure of psychic and emotional life—that are unconscious and invisible but that have a visible effect on the world, including the money economy. See Wilderson, Red, White & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms and Chico, cosmic hoboes in “Further Reading.” [All further references here will be listed in “Further Reading” unless otherwise noted.]
7
8 editors’
One of the central tenets of Afro-pessimism, which expands
2
upon the erudite work of Orlando Patterson, is a reoriented
understanding of the composition of slavery: instead of being defined as a relation of (forced) labor, it is more accurately thought of as a relation of property. The slave is objectified in such a way that they are legally made an object (a commodity) to be used and exchanged. It is not just their labor-power that is commodified—as with the worker—but their very being. As such, they are not recognized as a social subject and are thus precluded from the category of “human”—inclusion in humanity being predicated on social recognition, volition, subjecthood, and the valuation of life.
The slave, as an object, is socially dead, which means they are: 1) open to gratuitous violence, as opposed to violence contingent upon some transgression or crime; 2) natally alienated, their ties of birth not recognized and familial structures intentionally broken apart; and 3) generally dishonored, or disgraced before any thought or action is considered.
The social death of the slave goes to the very level of their being, defining their ontology. Thus, according to Afro-pessimism, the slave experiences their “slaveness” ontologically, as a “being for the captor,”3 not as an oppressed subject, who experiences exploitation and alienation, but as an object of accumulation and fungibility (exchangeability).
After the “nonevent of emancipation,”4 slavery did not simply give way to freedom. Instead, the legal disavowal of ownership reorganized domination and the former slave became the racialized Black “subject,” whose position was marked epidermally, per Frantz Fanon.5 What followed was a profound entrenchment of the concept of race, both psychically and juridically. Formally, the Black subject was no longer a slave, but
2. Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study.
3. See in this volume Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe.”
4. See in this volume Hartman, “The Burdened Individuality of
Freedom.”
5. Black Skin, White Masks.
introduction 9
the same formative relation of structural violence that maintained slavery remained—upheld explicitly by the police (former slave catchers) and white supremacy generally—hence preserving the equation that Black equals socially dead. Just as wanton violence was a constituent element of slavery, so it is to Blackness. Given the ongoing accumulation of Black death at the hands of the police—even despite increased visibility in recent years—it becomes apparent that a Black person on the street today faces open vulnerability to violence just as the slave did on the plantation. That there has recently been such an increase in media coverage and yet little decrease in murder reveals the ease with which anti-Black violence can be ignored by white society; at the same time this reveals that when one is Black one needn’t do anything to be targeted, as Blackness itself is criminalized.
With this understanding of slavery and Blackness, Afro-pessimism makes a critical shift in focus by moving away from the Black/ white binary and reframing it as Black/non-Black, in order to deemphasize the status of whiteness and to center analysis, rather, on the anti-Black foundations of race and modern society. In other words, “it is racial blackness as a necessary condition for enslavement that matters most, rather than whiteness as a sufficient condition for freedom.”6 As a result, it is Blackness, and more specifically anti-Blackness, that gives coherence to categories of non-Black—white, worker, gay, i.e., “human.” Categories of non-Black must establish their boundaries for inclusion in a group (humanity) by having a recognizable self within. There must also, consequently, be an outside to each group, and, as with the concept of humanity, it is Blackness that is without; it is Blackness that is the dark matter surrounding and holding together the categories of non-Black. Experientially, subjects, even Black ones, can obviously find themselves with any myriad identities, but ontologically Blackness is still violently excluded from even the meager scraps given when recognized.
The distinction that Afro-pessimism makes is important because it problematizes any positive affirmation of identity7—as non-
6. Sexton, “People-of-Color-Blindness: Notes on the Afterlife of Slavery.”
7. This doesn’t altogether eliminate the possibilities for organizing
10 editors’
Black categories are defined against the Blackness they are not, this relation of race indirectly (and directly, e.g., white teens’ racist snapchats) sustains anti-Blackness by producing and sustaining racialized categories. Stated otherwise, “the violence of anti- blackness produces black existence; there is no prior positive blackness that could be potentially appropriated. Black existence is simultaneously produced and negated by racial domination, both as presupposition and consequence. Affirmation of blackness proves to be impossible without simultaneously affirming the violence that structures black subjectivity itself.”8
Afro-pessimism departs with this understanding and illuminates the limits and failures of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements, such as their reformist ideologies concerning progress and their disastrous integration with bureaucratic machinery. If, as Afro-pessimism shows, it is not possible to affirm Blackness itself without at the same time affirming anti-Black violence, then the attempts at recognition and inclusion in society will only ever result in further social and real death. Individuals can of course achieve some status in society through “structural adjustment”9 (i.e., a kind of “whitening” effect), as has been superficially confirmed, but Blackness as a racialized category remains the object of gratuitous, constituent violence—as demonstrated by police murders, mass incarceration, urban planning, and surveillance (from cointelpro to special security codes at stores to indicate when Black customers enter). As Blackness is negated by the relations and structures of society, Afro-pessimism posits that the only way out is to negate that negation.
The challenges Afro-pessimism poses to the affirmation of Blackness extend to other identities as well and problematize identity-based politics. The efforts, on the part of such a
around identities. There are very real reasons why this is often necessary and groups are experimenting with ways of building autonomy that are also anti-essentialist and recognize the heterogeneity of supposedly static categories. One example is a negative affirmation of identity (the exclusion of cis men) in order to prevent any positive affirmation of another (a static notion of “womanhood”). See LIES, especially Vol. II.
8. R.L., “Wanderings of the Slave: Black Life and Social Death.”
9. Wilderson, Red, White & Black.
introduction 11
politics, to produce a coherent subject (and movement), and the reduction of antagonisms to a representable position, is not only the total circumscription of liberatory potential, but it is an extinguishment of rage with reform—which is to stake a claim in the state and society, and thus anti-Blackness. Against this, we choose, following Afro-pessimism, to understand Black liberation as a negative dialectic, a politics of refusal, and a refusal to affirm; as an embrace of disorder and incoherence;10 and as an act of political apostasy.11 This is not to categorically reject every project of reform—for decreased suffering will surely make life momentarily easier—but rather to take to task any movement invested in the preservation of society. Were they not to decry every action that didn’t fit within their rigid framework, then they might not fortify anti-Blackness as fully as they do. It is in the effort to garner legitimacy (an appeal to whiteness) that reformism requires a representable identity and code of actions, which excludes, and actually endangers, those who would reject such pandering. This also places undo faith in politicians and police to do something other than maintain, as they always have and will, the institutions—schools, courts, prisons, projects, voting booths, neighborhood associations—sustaining anti-Blackness.
Afro-pessimism can also be used to critique prevalent liberal discourses around community, accountability, innocence, and justice. Such notions sit upon anti-Black foundations and only go so far as to reconfigure, rather than abolish, the institutions that produce, control, and murder Black subjects.12 Take for example the appeal to innocence and demand for accountability, too frequently launched when someone Black is killed by police. The
10. See in this volume Wilderson, “The Prison Slave as Hegemony’s (Silent) Scandal.”
11. Apostasy – the total abandonment of one’s belief in a religion, party, or cause; Warren, “Black Nihilism and the Politics of Hope.”
12. Needless to say, these institutions are also, in general, meant to create productive, governable subjects and, therefore, all those deemed non-normative are either assimilated—via their identity being formally recognized and incorporated into culture and society—or they are met with a similar murderous violence. This violence, however, is contingent upon a refusal, transgression, or crime, which is to say it results from some action or identity, rather than a constituent element as it is with Blackness.
12 editors’
discourse of innocence operates within a binary of innocent/ guilty, which is founded on the belief that there is an ultimate fairness to the system and presumes the state to be the protector of all. This fails to understand the state’s fundamental investment in self-preservation, which is indivisible from white supremacy and the interests of capital. The discourse goes that if someone innocent is killed, an individual (the villainous cop) must be held accountable as a solution to this so-called injustice. The structural reality of anti-Black violence is completely obfuscated and justice is mistook as a concept independent from anti-Blackness. Discrimination is indeed tragic, but systematic dispossession and murder is designedly more—it is the justice system—and no amount of imprisoned cops, body cameras or citizen review boards will eliminate this.
Furthermore, Afro-pessimist analysis exposes the often unacknowledged ways that radical movements perpetuate anti- Black racism. One such way is in the rhetoric repeatedly used that takes an assumed (historically oppressed) subject at its center—e.g., workers or women.13 This conflates experience with existence and fails to acknowledge the incommensurate ontologies between, for instance, white women and Black women. To speak in generalities, of simply workers or women, is to speak from a position of anti-Blackness, for the non-racialized subject is the white, or at least non-Black, subject. For this reason, movements against capitalism, patriarchy, or gender mean unfortunately little if they don’t elucidate ontological disparities within a given site of oppression; and if they don’t unqualifiedly seek to abolish the totality of race and anti-Blackness. This is not to privilege anti- Black racism on a hierarchy of oppression, but to assert—against the disparaging lack of analysis—the unlivability of life for Blacks over centuries of social death and physical murder, perpetuated (at varying times) by all non-Black subjects in society.
∆
13. While not strictly in the purview of Afro-pessimism, it’s important to note the ways that subject-oriented movements have included/excluded various identities over time—e.g., both discursively and explicitly, worker’s movements mostly omitted women, and women’s movements mostly omitted trans people. The point is not to decry exclusion, but to encourage moving destructively through and out of all such gross limitations to being.
introduction 13
Finally, we should add that alongside the valuable theoretical offerings of Afro-pessimism, this reader was also motivated by a desire to contribute to the efforts of bringing these writings out of the ivory towers of the academy, the place from which all these writings originated. We wish to remove the materials from this stifling place and see them proliferate among those in the streets and prisons. The topics discussed here may have origins in a place of lofty theory, but they deal with the constant realities of millions of people. We therefore find it imperative that these theories directly inform the practices of everyone desiring a life other than this one—while not simply resorting to the empty gesture of empathy.14
We must acknowledge the fact that non-Black people are complicit in perpetuating anti-Blackness and face the necessity of abolishing all notions of the self and identity, practicing an anti- racism with a view toward the total abolition of the state, and developing an anti-capitalism aimed at the destitution of race. We take heed of the following statement: “If we are to be honest with ourselves, we must admit that the ‘Negro’ has been inviting whites, as well as civil society’s junior partners, to the dance of social death for hundreds of years, but few have wanted to learn the steps.”15 Consider this project an opening sashay.
14. “[T]he effort to counteract the commonplace callousness to black suffering requires that the white body be positioned in the place of the black body in order to make this suffering visible and intelligible. Yet if this violence can become palpable and indignation can be fully aroused only through the masochistic fantasy, then it becomes clear that empathy is double-edged, for in making the other’s suffering one’s own, this suffering is occluded by the other’s obliteration” (Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America).
15. Wilderson, “The Prison Slave as Hegemony’s (Silent) Scandal.”
∆∆ ∆
I.
BLACKS AND THE MASTER/ SLAVE RELATION*
Frank B. Wilderson, III Interviewed by C.S. Soong
C. S. Soong: The question for today is how to properly situate Black people in today’s world? What is their position in relation to other people? And what is the nature of their vulnerability to violence? Those questions can be addressed in a number of ways. Conservatives, Liberals, and radicals offer perspectives that perhaps you’ve heard over time. The answer offered by my guest today is singular and provocative, not least because he calls Black people, all Black people, slaves. But what does Frank Wilderson, III mean by slave? Why does he argue that the master/slave relation cannot be analogized with the capitalist/worker relation? And what does he mean when he asserts that slavery is social death? And that slaves, that is Blacks, are subject to gratuitous violence because their masters, that is all non-Blacks, need to exercise that violence in order to give their lives, their non-Black lives, integrity and coherence? Frank Wilderson is a writer, professor of African American studies and Drama at UC Irvine, and founder of what’s called the Afro-Pessimism movement. His books include Red, White and Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms, and Incognegro: A Memoir of Exile and Apartheid. Frank spent five years in South Africa as an elected official in the African National Congress during that country’s transition from apartheid and he was a member of the ANC’s armed wing. When Frank Wilderson joined me recently in studio I began by asking how important Marxism has been to his understanding of capitalism.
Frank Wilderson: I think that when I began to study Marxism in college I understood that here was a theory that took a kind
* Interview from “Against the Grain,” KPFA Radio, Berkeley, California, March 4, 2015. Transcription by the editors of this reader.
2015
15
16 wilderson
of attitude toward the world that was uncompromising. That was valuable to me because before that in junior high school and in high school I had seen the kind of performative political labor of people in the Panthers and people in the Students for a Democratic Society—part of that time was here—and I knew that these folks were on a mission that was more robust and more unflinching than the mission of certain types of Bobby Kennedy Democrats and members of the Civil Rights movement. When I actually began to study the theory I understood why their performance was so much more unflinching than other peoples’ performance. So I think the study of Marxism helped me get into thinking about relations of power, which I think is more important than simply thinking about the way power performs.
CSS: In other words, structures of power as opposed to how power tends to manifest itself in individual relations.
FW: Yes, and I also mean that if you kind of turn your head sideways and listen to most Americans on the Left talk about politics, what you’re going to hear is that the rhetorical weighting of their discourse tends to be heavily weighted on discriminatory actions, the effects of unfair relations on people. And so what we really don’t do so much in this country is—and this is what I found to be very different when I started traveling the world, when I went to Italy, and various places in South America and Africa—we’re not as readily able to think about power as a structure. We tend to think about power as a performance, a series of discriminatory acts. That’s okay if you’re a Liberal- Humanist-reformist, but if you’re a revolutionary, that simply leads you down a track of increasing wages or getting more rights for women or ending racial discrimination and you’re finding yourself in the same kind of cycle of performative oppression ten, twenty years later without an analysis of why the “fix” that you had years ago doesn’t last and isn’t working now.
CSS: Well, the antagonism according to the Marxists is that between capitalist and worker. Would you agree that the essential antagonism in social relations and political relations is in fact between capitalist on the one side and worker on the other?
Blacks and the Master/Slave Relation 17
FW: No. All of my work is an interrogation of that assumptive logic. I’m sometimes misunderstood to be saying that I have left Marxism. I’m sometimes misunderstood to be saying that the cognitive map that Marx gives us should be thrown out. That’s not what I’m saying. How do you throw out a cognitive map that explains political economy so well? What I’m saying is that in Das Kapital vol. I, Marx has two opportunities to think the relation between the slave and everyone else and each of those opportunities presents him with a kind of paradox, a conundrum; and instead of meditating on that he bounces off of it and continues to posit that the world is out of joint because there is a dichotomy between haves and have-nots, because there’s a dichotomy between those who accumulate capital and those who work for a wage. What I’m saying is that his hit on the slave and then bouncing off of that are a disavowal of the nature of the slave relation, which is symptomatic of the problems in political organizing and political thought on the Left. I’m saying that the antagonism in Das Kapital should be relegated to a conflict because there is an aspect of the thinking which presents itself with a coherent way out. The slave/non-slave, or the Black/human relation, presents us with a structural dynamic which cannot be reconciled and which does not have a coherent mode of redress.
CSS: Alright, you see the master/slave relation as the essential antagonism, so what do you mean by that? A lot of people would think, okay, slavery in the U.S., so Black slavery, and then 1865, the formal end of slavery. But then of course you have slavery today and we hear about issues with people in bondage, debt bondage, and other forms of bondage, so when you say the master/slave relation, what are you specifically referring to?
FW: There is no way I can actually answer that in a compact way, I think I have to step back a minute. So what Afro-pessimism—the conceptual lens or framework that myself and other people are working on—assumes is that you have to begin with an analysis of slavery that corrects the heretofore thinking about it. So the first thing that happens—and this is built on the work of Orlando Patterson’s 1982 tome Slavery and Social Death—the first thing we have to do is screw our heads on backwards. In other words, stop defining slavery through the experience of slaves. What happens normally is that people think of slavery as forced labor
18 wilderson
and people in chains. What Orlando Patterson does is shows that what slavery really is, is social death. In other words, social death defines the relation between the slave and all others. Forced labor is an example of the experience that slaves might have, but not all slaves were forced to work. So if you then move by saying that slavery is social death, by definition, then what is social death? Social death has three constituent elements: One is gratuitous violence, which means that the body of the slave is open to the violence of all others. Whether he or she receives that violence or not, he or she exists in a state of structural or open vulnerability. This vulnerability is not contingent upon his or her transgressing some type of law, as in going on strike with the worker. The other point is that the slave is natally alienated, which is to say that the temporality of one’s life that is manifest in filial and afilial relations—the capacity to have families and the capacity to have associative relations—may exist very well in your head. You might say, “I have a father, I have a mother,” but, in point of fact, the world does not recognize or incorporate your filial relations into its understanding of family. And the reason that the world can do this goes back to point number one: because you exist in a regime of violence which is gratuitous, open, and you are openly vulnerable to everyone else, not a regime of violence that is contingent upon you being a transgressed worker or transgressing woman or someone like that. And the third point is general dishonor, which is to say, you are dishonored in your very being— and I think that this is the nature of Blackness with everyone else. You’re dishonored prior to your performance of dishonored actions. So it takes a long time to build this but in a nutshell that’s it. And so that’s one of the moves of Afro-pessimism. If you take that move and you take out property relations—someone who’s owned by someone else—you take that out of the definition of slavery and you take out forced labor, and if you replace that with social death and those three constituent elements, what you have is a continuum of slavery-subjugation that Black people exist in and 1865 is a blip on the screen. It is not a paradigmatic moment, it is an experiential moment, which is to say that the technology of enslavement simply morphs and shape shifts—it doesn’t end with that.
CSS: If Orlando Patterson, who is a sociologist at Harvard, argues that
Blacks and the Master/Slave Relation 19
forced labor is not a defining characteristic of slavery, if he says that naked violence is one of the key elements of social death, which is slavery, and if the violence directed at Blacks is not based on, as you said, this person transgressing in some way, being disobedient in some way, refusing to consent in some way to what the ruling class thinks or does, then why is violence freely directed at Blacks? What is the reason that the non-white or the master in the master/slave relation treats Blacks violently?
FW: The short answer is that violence against the slave is integral to the production of that psychic space called social life. The repetitive nature of violence against the slave does not have the same type of utility that violence against the post-colonial subject has—in other words, in the first instance, to secure and maintain the occupation of land. It does not have the utility of violence against the working class, which would be to secure and maintain the extraction of surplus-value and the wage. We have to think more libidinally and in a more robust fashion. This is where it becomes really controversial and really troubling for a lot of people because what Patterson is arguing, and what people like myself and professor Jared Sexton and Saidiya Hartman at Columbia University have extended, is to say that what we need to do is begin to think of violence not as having essentially the kind of political or economic utility that violence in other revolutionary paradigms have. Violence against the slave sustains a kind of psychic stability for all others who are not slaves.
CSS: When you say that—and I’ve read some of your writings on the subject—it seems like you’re suggesting that only if some population perceives another population as inferior, or so degraded that anything can be done to them—unless they have that other in mind that somehow, psychologically and psychically—they can’t have the integrity that they want. Is that correct? And why would that be the case psychologically? Why would somebody need to have some other person seen in that light in order to feel actualized, in order to feel worthy of life?
FW: It’s a very good question and we could spend several hours on it, but what I’m trying to do is give you short-hand answers that have integrity and hopefully your listeners will do some more reading and research to actually see how these mechanisms work. But let’s take it for one second outside of the way in which I
20 wilderson
and other Afro-pessimists are theorizing it. One of our claims is that Blackness cannot be dis-imbricated from slaveness—that is a very controversial claim; that claim is actually the fault line right now of African and Black Studies across the country, the claim that Blackness and slaveness cannot be dis-imbricated, cannot be pulled apart. But I can’t argue against everyone who disagrees with that right now. One of the points that Patterson makes at a higher level of abstraction is that the concept of community, and the concept of freedom, and the concept of communal and interpersonal presence, actually needs a conceptual antithesis. In other words, you can’t think community without being able to register non-community. His book Slavery and Social Death goes back thousands of years and covers slavery in China and all over the world and he says that communal coherence has a lot of positive attributes: this is my language, this is how I organize my polity, these are the anthropological accoutrements of how we work our customs—but at the end of the day what it needs to know is what it is not. So the idea of freedom and the idea of communal life and the idea of civic relations has to have a kind of point of attention which is absent of that or different from that. This is the function that slavery presents or provides to coherence so that prior to Columbus, for example, the Choctaw might have someone inside a Choctaw community who transgresses the codes of the community so fiercely that they’re given a choice, and the choice at this moment of a transgression, which is beyond-the-beyond, is between real death—“We will kill you in an execution”—or social death. Nothing changes in the mind of that person tomorrow or the day after he or she chooses social death. He or she still thinks they have a cosmology, that they have intimate family relations, but the point that Patterson is making is that everything changes in the structure of that person’s dynamic with the rest of the tribe. So now that that person is a slave, that person is socially dead. This is bad for that person, obviously, but what he is suggesting is that that type of action regenerates the knowledge of our existence for everyone else. Now where I and some others take Patterson further is to say that Black, Blackness, and even the thing called Africa, cannot be dis-imbricated, cannot be pulled apart from that smaller scale process that he talks about with respect to Chinese communities or the Choctaw. In other words, there is a global consensus that Africa is the location of
Blacks and the Master/Slave Relation 21
sentient beings who are outside of global community, who are socially dead. That global consensus begins with the Arabs in 625 and it’s passed on to the Europeans in 1452. Prior to that global consensus you can’t think Black. You can think Uganda, Ashanti, Ndebele, you can think many different cultural identities, but Blackness cannot be dis-imbricated from the global consensus that decides here is the place which is emblematic of that moment the Choctaw person is spun out from social life to social death. That’s part of the foundation.
CSS: This is really provocative. Are you saying then—let’s just focus on the U.S.—that every African American, regardless of income or wealth or status, can and should be understood in the figure of the slave who is socially dead in relation to the master, who I presume is white?
FW: Well, the master is everyone else, whites and their junior partners, which in my book are colored immigrants. It’s just that colored immigrants exist in an intra-human status of degradation in relation to white people. They are degraded as humans, but they still exist paradigmatically in that position of the human. So yes, I am saying that. Now part of the reason is that one of the things that we are not doing is talking about the different ways in which different Black people live their existence as slaves. I’m willing to do that, but what’s interesting to me is the kind of anxiety that this theory elicits from people other than yourself. I mean this is the calmest conversation that I’ve had on this subject [laughter]. You could say to someone that you are a professor at UC Berkeley and there is a person in a sweatshop on the other side of the Rio Grande. This person in the sweatshop is working sixteen hours a day, cannot go to the bathroom, dies on the job from lack of medical benefits... and you are a kind of labor aristocrat. And they could say, “Okay, well that’s interesting.” And you could say to that person, “But if you read the work of Antonio Negri, the Italian communist, you come to understand that even though you live your life as a proletarian differently than a sweatshop laborer, you both stand in relation to capital in this same way, at the level of structural, paradigmatic arrangement.” That person would say, “Oh yeah! I get that, I get that.” You
introduction 11
politics, to produce a coherent subject (and movement), and the reduction of antagonisms to a representable position, is not only the total circumscription of liberatory potential, but it is an extinguishment of rage with reform—which is to stake a claim in the state and society, and thus anti-Blackness. Against this, we choose, following Afro-pessimism, to understand Black liberation as a negative dialectic, a politics of refusal, and a refusal to affirm; as an embrace of disorder and incoherence;10 and as an act of political apostasy.11 This is not to categorically reject every project of reform—for decreased suffering will surely make life momentarily easier—but rather to take to task any movement invested in the preservation of society. Were they not to decry every action that didn’t fit within their rigid framework, then they might not fortify anti-Blackness as fully as they do. It is in the effort to garner legitimacy (an appeal to whiteness) that reformism requires a representable identity and code of actions, which excludes, and actually endangers, those who would reject such pandering. This also places undo faith in politicians and police to do something other than maintain, as they always have and will, the institutions—schools, courts, prisons, projects, voting booths, neighborhood associations—sustaining anti-Blackness.
Afro-pessimism can also be used to critique prevalent liberal discourses around community, accountability, innocence, and justice. Such notions sit upon anti-Black foundations and only go so far as to reconfigure, rather than abolish, the institutions that produce, control, and murder Black subjects.12 Take for example the appeal to innocence and demand for accountability, too frequently launched when someone Black is killed by police. The
10. See in this volume Wilderson, “The Prison Slave as Hegemony’s (Silent) Scandal.”
11. Apostasy – the total abandonment of one’s belief in a religion, party, or cause; Warren, “Black Nihilism and the Politics of Hope.”
12. Needless to say, these institutions are also, in general, meant to create productive, governable subjects and, therefore, all those deemed non-normative are either assimilated—via their identity being formally recognized and incorporated into culture and society—or they are met with a similar murderous violence. This violence, however, is contingent upon a refusal, transgression, or crime, which is to say it results from some action or identity, rather than a constituent element as it is with Blackness.
12 editors’
discourse of innocence operates within a binary of innocent/ guilty, which is founded on the belief that there is an ultimate fairness to the system and presumes the state to be the protector of all. This fails to understand the state’s fundamental investment in self-preservation, which is indivisible from white supremacy and the interests of capital. The discourse goes that if someone innocent is killed, an individual (the villainous cop) must be held accountable as a solution to this so-called injustice. The structural reality of anti-Black violence is completely obfuscated and justice is mistook as a concept independent from anti-Blackness. Discrimination is indeed tragic, but systematic dispossession and murder is designedly more—it is the justice system—and no amount of imprisoned cops, body cameras or citizen review boards will eliminate this
Furthermore, Afro-pessimist analysis exposes the often unacknowledged ways that radical movements perpetuate anti- Black racism. One such way is in the rhetoric repeatedly used that takes an assumed (historically oppressed) subject at its center—e.g., workers or women.13 This conflates experience with existence and fails to acknowledge the incommensurate ontologies between, for instance, white women and Black women. To speak in generalities, of simply workers or women, is to speak from a position of anti-Blackness, for the non-racialized subject is the white, or at least non-Black, subject. For this reason, movements against capitalism, patriarchy, or gender mean unfortunately little if they don’t elucidate ontological disparities within a given site of oppression; and if they don’t unqualifiedly seek to abolish the totality of race and anti-Blackness. This is not to privilege anti- Black racism on a hierarchy of oppression, but to assert—against the disparaging lack of analysis—the unlivability of life for Blacks over centuries of social death and physical murder, perpetuated (at varying times) by all non-Black subjects in society.
We must acknowledge the fact that non-Black people are complicit in perpetuating anti-Blackness and face the necessity of abolishing all notions of the self and identity, practicing an anti- racism with a view toward the total abolition of the state, and developing an anti-capitalism aimed at the destitution of race. We take heed of the following statement: “If we are to be honest with ourselves, we must admit that the ‘Negro’ has been inviting whites, as well as civil society’s junior partners, to the dance of social death for hundreds of years, but few have wanted to learn the steps.”15 Consider this project an opening sashay.
FW: Yes, and I also mean that if you kind of turn your head sideways and listen to most Americans on the Left talk about politics, what you’re going to hear is that the rhetorical weighting of their discourse tends to be heavily weighted on discriminatory actions, the effects of unfair relations on people. And so what we really don’t do so much in this country is—and this is what I found to be very different when I started traveling the world, when I went to Italy, and various places in South America and Africa—we’re not as readily able to think about power as a structure. We tend to think about power as a performance, a series of discriminatory acts. That’s okay if you’re a Liberal- Humanist-reformist, but if you’re a revolutionary, that simply leads you down a track of increasing wages or getting more rights for women or ending racial discrimination and you’re finding yourself in the same kind of cycle of performative oppression ten, twenty years later without an analysis of why the “fix” that you had years ago doesn’t last and isn’t working now.
FW: No. All of my work is an interrogation of that assumptive logic. I’m sometimes misunderstood to be saying that I have left Marxism. I’m sometimes misunderstood to be saying that the cognitive map that Marx gives us should be thrown out. That’s not what I’m saying. How do you throw out a cognitive map that explains political economy so well? What I’m saying is that in Das Kapital vol. I, Marx has two opportunities to think the relation between the slave and everyone else and each of those opportunities presents him with a kind of paradox, a conundrum; and instead of meditating on that he bounces off of it and continues to posit that the world is out of joint because there is a dichotomy between haves and have-nots, because there’s a dichotomy between those who accumulate capital and those who work for a wage. What I’m saying is that his hit on the slave and then bouncing off of that are a disavowal of the nature of the slave relation, which is symptomatic of the problems in political organizing and political thought on the Left. I’m saying that the antagonism in Das Kapital should be relegated to a conflict because there is an aspect of the thinking which presents itself with a coherent way out. The slave/non-slave, or the Black/human relation, presents us with a structural dynamic which cannot be reconciled and which does not have a coherent mode of redress.
CSS: Alright, you see the master/slave relation as the essential antagonism, so what do you mean by that? A lot of people would think, okay, slavery in the U.S., so Black slavery, and then 1865, the formal end of slavery. But then of course you have slavery today and we hear about issues with people in bondage, debt bondage, and other forms of bondage, so when you say the master/slave relation, what are you specifically referring t
: There is no way I can actually answer that in a compact way, I think I have to step back a minute. So what Afro-pessimism—the conceptual lens or framework that myself and other people are working on—assumes is that you have to begin with an analysis of slavery that corrects the heretofore thinking about it. So the first thing that happens—and this is built on the work of Orlando Patterson’s 1982 tome Slavery and Social Death—the first thing we have to do is screw our heads on backwards. In other words, stop defining slavery through the experience of slaves. What happens normally is that people think of slavery as forced labor
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and people in chains. What Orlando Patterson does is shows that what slavery really is, is social death. In other words, social death defines the relation between the slave and all others. Forced labor is an example of the experience that slaves might have, but not all slaves were forced to work. So if you then move by saying that slavery is social death, by definition, then what is social death? Social death has three constituent elements: One is gratuitous violence, which means that the body of the slave is open to the violence of all others. Whether he or she receives that violence or not, he or she exists in a state of structural or open vulnerability. This vulnerability is not contingent upon his or her transgressing some type of law, as in going on strike with the worker. The other point is that the slave is natally alienated, which is to say that the temporality of one’s life that is manifest in filial and afilial relations—the capacity to have families and the capacity to have associative relations—may exist very well in your head. You might say, “I have a father, I have a mother,” but, in point of fact, the world does not recognize or incorporate your filial relations into its understanding of family. And the reason that the world can do this goes back to point number one: because you exist in a regime of violence which is gratuitous, open, and you are openly vulnerable to everyone else, not a regime of violence that is contingent upon you being a transgressed worker or transgressing woman or someone like that. And the third point is general dishonor, which is to say, you are dishonored in your very being— and I think that this is the nature of Blackness with everyone else. You’re dishonored prior to your performance of dishonored actions. So it takes a long time to build this but in a nutshell that’s it. And so that’s one of the moves of Afro-pessimism. If you take that move and you take out property relations—someone who’s owned by someone else—you take that out of the definition of slavery and you take out forced labor, and if you replace that with social death and those three constituent elements, what you have is a continuum of slavery-subjugation that Black people exist in and 1865 is a blip on the screen. It is not a paradigmatic moment, it is an experiential moment, which is to say that the technology of enslavement simply morphs and shape shifts—it doesn’t end with that.
CSS: If Orlando Patterson, who is a sociologist at Harvard, argues that
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forced labor is not a defining characteristic of slavery, if he says that naked violence is one of the key elements of social death, which is slavery, and if the violence directed at Blacks is not based on, as you said, this person transgressing in some way, being disobedient in some way, refusing to consent in some way to what the ruling class thinks or does, then why is violence freely directed at Blacks? What is the reason that the non-white or the master in the master/slave relation treats Blacks violently?
FW: The short answer is that violence against the slave is integral to the production of that psychic space called social life. The repetitive nature of violence against the slave does not have the same type of utility that violence against the post-colonial subject has—in other words, in the first instance, to secure and maintain the occupation of land. It does not have the utility of violence against the working class, which would be to secure and maintain the extraction of surplus-value and the wage. We have to think more libidinally and in a more robust fashion. This is where it becomes really controversial and really troubling for a lot of people because what Patterson is arguing, and what people like myself and professor Jared Sexton and Saidiya Hartman at Columbia University have extended, is to say that what we need to do is begin to think of violence not as having essentially the kind of political or economic utility that violence in other revolutionary paradigms have. Violence against the slave sustains a kind of psychic stability for all others who are not slaves.
CSS: When you say that—and I’ve read some of your writings on the subject—it seems like you’re suggesting that only if some population perceives another population as inferior, or so degraded that anything can be done to them—unless they have that other in mind that somehow, psychologically and psychically—they can’t have the integrity that they want. Is that correct? And why would that be the case psychologically? Why would somebody need to have some other person seen in that light in order to feel actualized, in order to feel worthy of life?
FW: It’s a very good question and we could spend several hours on it, but what I’m trying to do is give you short-hand answers that have integrity and hopefully your listeners will do some more reading and research to actually see how these mechanisms work. But let’s take it for one second outside of the way in which I
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and other Afro-pessimists are theorizing it. One of our claims is that Blackness cannot be dis-imbricated from slaveness—that is a very controversial claim; that claim is actually the fault line right now of African and Black Studies across the country, the claim that Blackness and slaveness cannot be dis-imbricated, cannot be pulled apart. But I can’t argue against everyone who disagrees with that right now. One of the points that Patterson makes at a higher level of abstraction is that the concept of community, and the concept of freedom, and the concept of communal and interpersonal presence, actually needs a conceptual antithesis. In other words, you can’t think community without being able to register non-community. His book Slavery and Social Death goes back thousands of years and covers slavery in China and all over the world and he says that communal coherence has a lot of positive attributes: this is my language, this is how I organize my polity, these are the anthropological accoutrements of how we work our customs—but at the end of the day what it needs to know is what it is not. So the idea of freedom and the idea of communal life and the idea of civic relations has to have a kind of point of attention which is absent of that or different from that. This is the function that slavery presents or provides to coherence so that prior to Columbus, for example, the Choctaw might have someone inside a Choctaw community who transgresses the codes of the community so fiercely that they’re given a choice, and the choice at this moment of a transgression, which is beyond-the-beyond, is between real death—“We will kill you in an execution”—or social death. Nothing changes in the mind of that person tomorrow or the day after he or she chooses social death. He or she still thinks they have a cosmology, that they have intimate family relations, but the point that Patterson is making is that everything changes in the structure of that person’s dynamic with the rest of the tribe. So now that that person is a slave, that person is socially dead. This is bad for that person, obviously, but what he is suggesting is that that type of action regenerates the knowledge of our existence for everyone else. Now where I and some others take Patterson further is to say that Black, Blackness, and even the thing called Africa, cannot be dis-imbricated, cannot be pulled apart from that smaller scale process that he talks about with respect to Chinese communities or the Choctaw. In other words, there is a global consensus that Africa is the location of
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sentient beings who are outside of global community, who are socially dead. That global consensus begins with the Arabs in 625 and it’s passed on to the Europeans in 1452. Prior to that global consensus you can’t think Black. You can think Uganda, Ashanti, Ndebele, you can think many different cultural identities, but Blackness cannot be dis-imbricated from the global consensus that decides here is the place which is emblematic of that moment the Choctaw person is spun out from social life to social death. That’s part of the foundation.
CSS: This is really provocative. Are you saying then—let’s just focus on the U.S.—that every African American, regardless of income or wealth or status, can and should be understood in the figure of the slave who is socially dead in relation to the master, who I presume is white?
FW: Well, the master is everyone else, whites and their junior partners, which in my book are colored immigrants. It’s just that colored immigrants exist in an intra-human status of degradation in relation to white people. They are degraded as humans, but they still exist paradigmatically in that position of the human. So yes, I am saying that. Now part of the reason is that one of the things that we are not doing is talking about the different ways in which different Black people live their existence as slaves. I’m willing to do that, but what’s interesting to me is the kind of anxiety that this theory elicits from people other than yourself. I mean this is the calmest conversation that I’ve had on this subject [laughter]. You could say to someone that you are a professor at UC Berkeley and there is a person in a sweatshop on the other side of the Rio Grande. This person in the sweatshop is working sixteen hours a day, cannot go to the bathroom, dies on the job from lack of medical benefits... and you are a kind of labor aristocrat. And they could say, “Okay, well that’s interesting.” And you could say to that person, “But if you read the work of Antonio Negri, the Italian communist, you come to understand that even though you live your life as a proletarian differently than a sweatshop laborer, you both stand in relation to capital in this same way, at the level of structural, paradigmatic arrangement.” That person would say, “Oh yeah! I get that, I get that.” You say to someone that all Blacks are slaves and that we’re going to change the definition of slavery because the other
things are not definitions, they are actually anecdotes, and your teacher in third grade told you that you don’t use an anecdote to define something. And that person says, “Oh wait a minute, I know a person who’s richer than me and also Black and they live in the Tenderloin...” and it just goes off to the races. It’s a symptomatic response primarily because they understand that what Black people suffer is real and comprehensive but there is actually no prescriptive, rhetorical gesture which could actually write a sentence about how to redress that. Most Americans, most people in the world, are not willing to engage in a paradigm of oppression that does not offer some type of way out. But that is what we live with as Black people every day.
CSS: Let me take us on what sounds like a bit of a detour, but I think it will help you clarify certain concepts that you’re forwarding, and that’s to go to Antonio Gramsci’s work and think about a word that he had a very specific definition of, which is “hegemony.” And of course Gramsci, coming out of the Marxist tradition, was very interested in workers and capital and the struggle between capitalists and workers, although he was also interested in a lot of other things. What did Gramsci mean by the word hegemony?
FW: In 1922 Antonio Gramsci was working for the Comintern and he asked Lenin the following question: “How did you create this successful revolution and I can’t get it off the ground in Italy?” Lenin said, “Well there is no trough of civil society between our working class and the command modality of capitalism, the violent manifestations of the capitalist state. We go on strike and the Cossacks come out.” And Gramsci began to theorize: between working class suffering and state violence and state institutionality there’s this thing called civil society which captivates the workers—in other words, induces a kind of spontaneous consent to the values of capital. Guild associations, schools—today it would be talk shows, but not this talk show of course [laughter]—and he began to theorize that what Lenin meant by hegemony, which is the domination of imperialist countries over countries that are trying to evolve into a kind of revolutionary dispensation, is different than what he needed to develop his theory of hegemony and so he came up with three constituent elements: influence, leadership, and consent. By influence, leadership, and consent he means the influence of
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the ruling class—not the influence of one person or another, but the influence of a class—the leadership of its ideas—which is to say the idea of meritocracy, which was a very bad idea for a Marxist—and the consent of the working class to that influence and those ideas. What he sought to do was to find ways to break the spontaneous consent to those ideas. Once he could break the spontaneous consent to those ideas, then the working class of a Western, so-called devout country like Italy would be able to see what Marxists think of as the antagonism between them and the ruling class. Then it would move from a passive revolution to a real revolution, which would be a violent overthrow of the state. The European Gramscians actually leave out that last part, the violent overthrow of the state, but that was actually his dream
FW: When a state is stable in a capitalist dispensation, such as Canada, then there is an equilibrium between force and consent. In other words, one of the things you have in a “good” (for capitalists) dispensation is a smooth situation. So for the hundreds of years it took to develop capitalism, there was all this violence. Once people have been remolded from peasants and whatever else into workers, then in a capitalist dispensation, just as in a patriarchal dispensation, the violence goes into remission. That’s what Gramsci means by equilibrium. Violence goes in remission and it only needs to rear its ugly head in those singular moments, which hopefully are not global for the capitalist, when the working class refuses or transgresses those symbolic codes that it has consented to
CSS: Such as general strikes, mass aggression against the capitalist order... FW: Exactly.
CSS: So then this equilibrium between force and consent, which constitutes
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hegemony in Gramsci’s mind, how does that notion apply or not in your mind
to the relationship between master and slave?
FW: Consent is never a constituent element of the slave relation. If only Marx had picked up on this, but he says in Capital that he doesn’t understand the slave to exist in a relation of pure force but then he moves away from that. So, why is that? Well, one of the things that Orlando Patterson points out is that any stratified society—by that he means for example a capitalist society—only comes into being through a kind of pre-history of violence—the violence that it takes to move from feudalism to capitalism. But once the state of capitalism is set up the violence goes into remission. But then he goes on to say that what’s interesting about the slave estate—the slave estate is actually a phrase from the Black feminist Hortense Spillers—or the slave relation is that the violent pre-history of the slave relation carries over and becomes the concurrent dynamic of the current history of slavery. And that is really, really profound. It is so profound, that it’s traumatic and painful even for Black politicos and Black writers and you see the pain of that coming through in slave narratives. In the film Twelve Years a Slave, there’s a lot of narrative energy put into making sense of how and why Edwin Epps beats his concubine, Patsy, and why his wife wants him to beat her. So it kind of looks like ordinary sadism and jealousy on the wife’s part and so it actually almost becomes a sort of sick love triangle. Alright, put the film away. Pick up the book and what you find is that the violence against the slaves in the book that became the movie actually has no utility, it has no rationale. For instance between a place like Berkley and San Jose there were about four hundred plantations—I know because my father is from one of those plantations—and you have what I would call a bacchanal of pleasure, not a kind of utilitarian need to extract work or obedience out of people, number one. Number two, what you find is that the families on these plantations all participate in the regular beating of slaves—children, wives, husbands... It sustains the psychic health of the people in the first ontological instance. In the second instance, it gets good sugar cane production out of them—and that could even be questioned
SS: If you believe the plight of Black people does not mirror the plight
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of the working class because of gratuitous, as opposed to reasoned, violence against Blacks, and that there is no consent coming from Black people as there is when workers buy into the capitalist order and agree to offer their services in ways that satisfy capitalists, then what about Native Americans? What do you say to those who say the plight of Black people mirrors the treatment of Native Americans?
FW: A lot of people have been genocided so the middle 88 pages of my book, Red, White and Black, first begins by honoring the destruction of Native Americans and what that has meant for white Americans. However, to make it really simple, to pare it down, I do think that there is, in the main, a utility to the genocide of Native Americans that does not mirror the pre- logical “rationale” of the violence against Blacks. Indians are genocided, in the main, for the occupation of Turtle Island, which is primarily why so much Native American theorization builds upon Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth and does not build upon Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks. In other words, so much theorization under what I call the meta-commentary called Indigenism leads us back to thinking genocide as a mechanism for usurpation of cartography, of space. Violence against Black people is a mechanism for the usurpation of subjectivity, of life, of being. It’s great if you have a place to stay, but if you don’t have a sense of your own identity, that’s even worse. I think that the repetitive violence against Blacks, if we get back to social death, produces a regenerative form of being in everyone else
CSS: In other words, settlers wanted Indian land so they killed Indians in large part to get the land, whereas what non-Blacks want from Blacks is not land but...
FW: ...but being. If you look at the Dred Scott decision, there’s a really interesting three or four paragraphs in this two hundred and fifty-page decision where Judge Taney says to the lower court, “We are returning Dred Scott to slavery.” One lower court had said, “Dred Scott made it to Minnesota, so he’s not a slave, he made it to a free territory.” The next court said, “No, he never got released, manumission from his master so he is a slave.” The Supreme Court returns Dred Scott to slavery and then does what is known in jurisprudential logic as a “Herculean opinion.” It says
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to both courts, “We’re not siding with the court that returned him to slavery because he didn’t get freedom from his master; we are trying to correct your thinking in this. In order for Dred Scott to appear before the Bar, he had to become a jurisprudential subject and Africa is a place of non-community. As a result, we’re trying to teach you a lesson—there’s no such thing as a jurisprudential subject that can come out of Africa. We are returning him to slavery not because he didn’t get freedom from his master but because he had no standing before the Bar.” And then they go on to talk about Native Americans and they say that Native Americans actually have political community: “We recognize the arrangements of natality, affiliation, cartography. They have a degraded community in our eyes, and we’re trying to help them evolve to become a superior community, but they actually have community.” This is to say that the people on reservations are subjects worthy of jurisprudential adjudication. So in other words, return him to slavery not because he didn’t get permission to be freed, but because he is not a human being.
CSS: Well, let’s engage in a thought experiment. I’m thinking back to your claim about the master in the master/slave relation: unless they dole out violence to Blacks, they can have no psychic or psychological integrity or security. Let’s posit that all Blacks are wiped out. There is a genocide and all Blacks are removed. In that case, in a sense, you are saying by implication that humanity would cease to exist because the conceptual coherence that it needs would be absent.
FW: Exactly, and that will never happen. We need to bring people like David Marriott from UC Santa Cruz and Jared Sexton from UC Irvine to think more psychoanalytically about this. But in a nutshell, the reason that this will never happen is, remember, that the utility of violence against the slave is not the same as the utility of violence against the Indian, the post-colonial subject, the worker, or the woman. In Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, he’s negotiating between two dynamics: one is negrophilia—“I just love Black people, I love Black music, I want to sleep with them, I want to be around them...”—and one is negrophobia—“Yeah you can come over to my crib but don’t bring your friends.” And so, what he’s saying is that the psychic arrangement of the collective unconscious is manifest with the push/pull in the
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collective unconscious between negrophilia and negrophobia. It’s not important how that gets worked out. What’s important is that that is a process of psychic integration which is necessary for global community. So, one day there could be negrophobia in one psyche, the next day there could be negrophilia. One community could be completely, like teenage boys in the suburbs, negrophilic. Another community, like teenage boys in the deep south, could be completely negrophobic. The point is not that this gets worked out in a decisive way one way or the other because that would make Blacks like Indians, that they have something tangible to give up, like workers. The point is that it’s there that this is the push/pull of collective unconscious meditations. In that push/ pull, whether it’s negrophilia or negrophobia, the concept that has to be reiterated is that the Black is an implement of that negotiation. If the Black does not become an implement of that negotiation then you have not a crisis but an epistemological break, a catastrophe in the knowledge-arrangement of the world. We would find ourselves on the cusp of a new world order, but one that could not be predicted in the way that Marx does
CSS: Let’s talk more about the Black experience of social death. I’m wondering specifically if you feel that African Americans in this country can in fact consciously acknowledge the violence, the structure of violence, in which they operate and encounter every day.
FW: Well, we can articulate it, but normally when we’re by ourselves. Because when we get into Progressive communities— first of all it’s not even heard of, I used to work in banking for eight years and you can’t even talk about this stuff—but in Progressive humanities there’s a policing action that happens, which is to say: “Make your grammar of suffering, your paradigmatic arrangement, your relationship to structural violence articulate with the other oppressed people in the room.” Once that happens we’re trapped. I mean we’re surrounded by white supremacists, militarization, the police, the military, but we’re also surrounded by people-of-color-consciousness that polices our capacity to flower, to expand upon theorization that I’m doing. A short anecdote: there was a conference years ago at UC Santa Cruz. At the end of the conference, Haunani-Kay Trask, the revolutionary from Hawai‘i, spoke and then we were supposed to break away
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into groups. The conference organizer said, “You must go into a breakaway room based upon your color—in other words how you are policed.” And immediately—this is how the antagonism manifests itself symptomatically—the Black people were like, “Yes! Now we get to be in a place where we can talk about how we are policed as Blacks.” But the people of color stalled by saying, “There’s no such thing as yellow. We’re Koreans, we’re Japanese, we’re Chinese, we’re Taiwanese. We’re not going to let you pigeonhole us into this position when we have our ethnic identities.” The Latinos did the same thing. The Native Americans did the same thing. My wife, who is white, went to the white room and they rejected the entire arrangement. They said, “We’re just going to talk about ourselves as Armenians, as women, as Jews.” It was the Black people who were energized by the prospect of leaving culture and identity by the wayside and having a conversation about how we fit into the gaze of the police. I think it was up to the other people to be authorized by that project and stop complaining about the fact that the exercise was putting them in a box that was positional and not cultural. But until that happens, there’s no real political coalition building that’s happening. What’s happening, as Jared Sexton says, is Black people become the refugees in everyone else’s political project
CSS: Let me ask you a personal question, but you can of course refuse to answer. So your wife is white; given what you were telling me about the position of Blacks, what’s your sense that she could truly ever understand your consciousness, your positioning within society? And if she can’t, then what are the prospects of a relationship that could reach as deeply as, for example, two Black people or two white together could?
FW: Well, she can’t. She tries, but what’s interesting and important is that I would never put my marriage out there as a kind of example of what people could aspire to. As a kind of short hand, I call her my wife and she calls me her husband. But the reality is that I’m her slave. And that doesn’t change because we have sentimental—as I would say, contrapuntal—emotions to the contrary. In fact, oftentimes those contrapuntal emotions are mechanisms or means of disavowing the true nature of the relation. Now, I will give her a lot of props for the past eight years that she has actually inculcated this logic. She did her best at that
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Santa Cruz conference I talked about to tell the white people in that room, “We’re not here to think about how we think about ourselves, we’re here to think about our complicity as whites with policing. Not as women, not as gays, not Armenians, not as Jews, but as white.” On the other hand, if you read my book Incognegro, you’ll see that in the first eight years, there was nothing but resistance to that. So that resistance is as traumatizing as the second eight years are regenerative and I will say that the first eight years are what Black people should take away from that. There’s no way in hell we should have to go through the kind of resistance that white people and non-Black people have to this particular logic because they know it’s the truth. They know their own anxieties about the question, Where is Blackness?, but they can’t approach it because what it would mean is a kind of confrontation with people who are intimate to them that they don’t know they could withstand. And so the real question is, Will these people do all they can to fall into the abyss of nonexistence?, not about how they will perform as partial allies while keeping their cultural presence.
CSS: Why would a Black person, why would you, choose intentionally, consciously, to enter into a life relationship in which you perceive yourself as the figure of the slave?
FW: I don’t think it’s a fair question because the question implies that, knowing what I know, I can actually change my life in an essential way. The question actually takes us away from the problem that I’ve outlined and actually puts the responsibility of correcting the situation on me when actually it should be on you.
CSS: I hear that and I think that prompts me to ask the final thing I want to bring up with you which is regarding how we hear a lot about groups and people who are victims. There is this victimhood frame and so these people have been victimized by, let’s say, another group of people and then the critique is that, by focusing on that, by concentrating on that, you then deflect attention away from their subjectivity, from their agency, from what they can do about their circumstance. Are you concerned that the master/slave relation, which is positioning Blacks as foremost a victim, in my mind, and then focusing only or mainly on a group status as victim, tends to deny—and we’re speaking here now about Blacks—the kind of agency, I think you would admit, that they
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have at least some semblance of ? And maybe some more than others based on
their position in society?
FW: I don’t agree with that and we don’t have the time to actually get into this, but my book, Red, White and Black, is a critique of agency as a generic category. What I’m saying is that, okay, I’m not Elijah Mohammed, I don’t believe that the white man is the devil and that this is all divined by god. I do believe that there is a way out. But I believe that the way out is a kind of violence so magnificent and so comprehensive that it scares the hell out of even radical revolutionaries. So, in other words, the trajectory of violence that Black slave revolts suggest, whether it be in the 21st century or the 19th century, is a violence against the generic categories of life, agency being one of them. That’s what I meant by an epistemological catastrophe. Marx posits an epistemological crisis, which is to say moving from one system of human arrangements and relations to another system of human relations and arrangements. What Black people embody is the potential for a catastrophe of human arrangements writ large. I think that there have been moments—the Black Liberation Army in the 1970s and 1980s is a prime example—of how the political violence of the Black Liberation Army far outpaced the anti-capitalist and internationalist discourse that it had and that’s what scares people; and as Saidiya Hartman says, “A Black revolution makes everyone freer than they actually want to be.” A Marxist revolution blows the lid off of economic relations; a feminist revolution blows the lid off patriarchal relations; a Black revolution blows the lid off the unconscious and relations writ large
CSS: I have to ask you, when you talk about this violence, in maybe the ideal situation of a Black revolution, what are we talking about concretely? Who or what is the violence directed against? Are we talking about literally the elimination of the master threat physically?
FW: Well, the short answer is that’s for me to know and for you to find out [laughter]. And the long answer is that as a professor I’m uniquely unqualified to actually make that answer. I rely on providing analysis and then getting those marching orders from people in the streets.
II.
THE BURDENED INDIVIDUALITY OF FREEDOM*
Saidiya Hartman
The limits of political emancipation appear at once in the fact that the state can liberate itself from constraint without man himself being really liberated; that a state may be a free state without man himself being a free man
stupid idpol
Surprise surprise, right wing nationalists view excessive anti-rash hysteria as a net positive 4 their agenda. Who could’ve predicted such a thing?
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/07/us/politics/biden-abortion-catholic-history.html
What wokeness is not
Wokeness is not about whites hating themselves. If that were true there wouldn’t be hundreds of white Breadtubers who are not only non self loathing but also some of whom are arrogant
Wokeness does not mean African Americans or BIPOC as a whole are always victims no matter what. If that were true, then Liberal 2.0 SJWs wouldn’t be getting away with harassing Dr Ben Carson, Candace Owens and Kanye West
If people wrongly think Liberal 2.0s are Anti Asian because of this, then how come so many Western Liberal 2.0 SJWs like K-Pop or Xiran Jay Zhao or for their outrage at the two Asian owned Atlanta massage parlor shootings?
Wokeness is not about causing endless strife. Republicans generally make no solid effort to build bridges, and Republicans just outrage monger over our first world exaggerated issues.
Wokeness : a strong commitment to identity politics, or engaging in performative in-group rituals, which uses its own distinct jargon, and which downplays economic analysis.
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lTentacleMonsterl
Incel/MRA Climate Change R-slur
Wes Yang's take on the successor ideology is useful.
short:
"Liberalism is always in a sense succeeding itself, it's true, but when it crosses over into annulling its own foundational commitments an important threshold has been crossed"
some off the cuff examples: a prominent lawyer for the ACLU now advocates for effectively banning abigail shrier's book; "antiracist" training materials declaring that being on time is contrary to blackness; et cetera
long:
We have basic problem with defining what's happening within American institutions. Everyone who is a participant in those settings knows that we're in the midst of kind of a bourgeois revolution, a sort of bourgeois moral revolution, in which certain foundational liberal values concerning free speech due process, the presumption of innocence and so forth, have come to be seen increasingly as obstacles to the path of the attainment of a particular vision of justice that's being articulated and pursued by the activist classes whose ideas, that were once confined to obscure pockets of academia, have increasingly become sort of mainstream through the media and through social media as a part of the parlance of everyday life that affects those who are operating within those settings.
There's a number of different ways to refer to it. Often, it's heavily positively or negatively valanced. So a term like social justice is sort of an attempt to identify the cause with justice as we all understand it, justice as such. A term like identity politics is a little more neutrally valanced, but it doesn't actually encompass everything that compass under the rubric of what we see happening right now.Other terms from the right, such as cultural Marxism or postmodern Neo Marxism, in addition to having some descriptive problems often have a spoiled provenance that people will end up pointing out in either sort of moralistic or pedantic terms often in ways that are both moralistic and pedantic that serve the function of preventing us from being able to talk about what is happening.And so I was just sort of talking to myself on Twitter, writing a thread where I described some implicit bias training that the New York City Board of Education or the Department of Education has sort of required all of its employees to take. There was a screenshot listing some of the premises underlying this training, a description of white supremacy culture and the various facets of it and sort of white supremacy culture was characterized as consisting of perfectionism, a sense of urgency, worship of the written word.The more you went into it and you started to break down both the internal inconsistencies of some of these ideas, but also recognizing the provenance of them, you saw that there were ideas taken from anti-colonial studies from post-colonial writings from black nationalist inflected approach that sees whiteness as itself like a form of oppression of nonwhite people.
I ended up saying the sort of what's being encoded here is so diverse, and in many cases, so internally incoherent, and yet all of these different activist movements are moving together under a single umbrella and we need a word for it. And the word would be one that was as vague as the movement itself, sort of the successor ideology, because we are in the midst of a kind of ideological succession and the succession is one that makes reference to an often sort of masquerades as being consistent with the liberal principles of fairness and tolerance out of which it grows.
But that in fact take this in a position where we end up seeing it necessarily to annul or at any rate at minimum, draw a boundary around the exercise of those principles. That ended up just being this thing I threw out. I said, "Oh, let's call it the successor ideology."
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3 mo. ago
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The fundamental issue with such framing is that, just like everything is politics, everything is also IDPol. I find my view of it - it being radical liberalism, recognition of failures of liberalism & attempts to fulfill liberal values and ideals - a more accurate description personally, but ultimately, to each their own
walkaway
bipoc
invol713
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2 yr. ago
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The fact that Trump 2020 had more minority votes for a Rep is a positive sign. Of course now the Reps will probably piss it away with there dumbassery. But it is good to see that more are waking up to the Dems treachery and looking at their options more.
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super_nova_91
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2 yr. ago
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If you vote for trump you ain't black -Joe Biden
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narcsurvivor614
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2 yr. ago
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It still appalls me that every black person didn’t stand up in attention to this statement. It should’ve been a wake up call, a come to Jesus moment in which every black would be asking themselves, “Now why am I voting democrat again?”
kyle
https://www.reddit.com/r/walkaway/comments/qsgsbn/you_can_be_a_fan_or_whichever_side_of_politics/
woke sign
laughing at all of these woke businesses that think their virtue signalling is going to save them from the anarchy they have helped create. This isn't about racism, it never was, it's always just been excuse for lawlessness
Ya these people are probably happy when someone dies. So they have an excuse to virtue signal and riot. They just tweedle their thumbs waiting til someone dies. Then they go "YES lets go party in the form of protest!" So fucking dumb and evil. They don't think they do. But subconsciously they do
its a shit deal for the community to be against the community rather than being helpful and supportive by allowing a dialogue to happen. assuming this is my city up here in the OP, the numbers increase after curfew. showing many are not there to peacefully protest but to participate in riots and looting. sadly the other comment about "laughing at all of these woke businesses that think their virtue signaling is going to save them" its not virtue signaling, its not unity, it is not their choice. it is forced upon them to bend a knee and write those signs on their businesses. from another thread i responded to this with.
what choice does a person or business have in a city that elects nothing but DLF candidates to their city council. the left has created these laws in these urban areas and tasked the police with upholding them. in a country that censors a sitting president of the united states, blames the right for violence but cheers when it is from the left and deplatforms entire political parties on reddit. its abundantly clear the divisiveness and hate is from the left. when the right reach out, the left (aoc) will scream at you and say you tried to have me murdered. in lieu of having a dialogue or working on important issues with regard to inequality and injustice.
where is kapernickle, he bailed out the people arrested last year who in the same day were called outside instigators by governor walz, mayor frey and carter. who all claimed those arrested were 100% outside agitators, instigators not from minnesota.
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rse bs
minmidmaxx
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2 yr. ago
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He asked twice and got two non-answers. She even started pulling out the victim card on the second one. These fuckin people are clowns who hate America and love power.
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c pratt
Well, it's not about loyalty, it's about dividing the artist from his work. For some people, these people have done questionable things, everyone does tho. It's not our business, but everyone has the right to make an opinion about it (I'm not making an opinion about it cause idgaf), but we can still appreciate their work.
They all loved Chris Pratt when he was Starlord and kept quiet, they loved J K Rowling when she kept quiet. One of the big reasons I left the left was I realized they have no loyalty. Every one of those upvotes would become a downvotes instantly if Dolly said anything they deem 'problematic'.
even said anything problematic. They just don’t like the Church he attends.
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swaggheti98
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10 mo. ago
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Yeah, he wasn’t even some kind of political mouthpiece endorsing his own views. People just started digging through celeb’s history as they usually do and pointed out his church. Which behaves like a church; enforcing christian values among its people.
veedio guunns
velesxrxe
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4 mo. ago
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Australians are so free that their government allowed some people to stray as far as 5 kilometers from their house!
This is the prisoners colony bruv, ya can’t ave a bunch o’ guns here without a proper loicense!
party swtch
The Democrats have been attempting to rewrite history to seem like the righteous party. If you are a conservative, libertarian, moderate, or some other name for a reasonable person, you need to really research history and know how to debate these myths.
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KaKawBitches
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4 yr. ago
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LBJ was KKK according to recently released documents from the FBI JFK files. https://www.archives.gov/files/research/jfk/releases/docid-32129399.pdf
Democrat leaders have zero political incentive to improve black communities. They push policies that keep them dependent on government assistance and economically stagnant because they want the votes and they know people won't bite the hand that feeds them.
Dependence is the ultimate chain that Democrats use to keep black people enslaved. It was only once I realized this that I realized how profoundly racist the Democrat party is and how hypocritical they are for claiming to be against racism.
Silence_is_Death
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4 yr. ago
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If they don't reinforce their brainwashing they might actually have to admit they're wrong. The narcissists would rather throw themselves off a cliff than for a single moment admit they were wrong and taught lies by college quacks pushing Marxism and the propaganda machine built over decades to keep people dependent on lies
yehwotmate
Voted for Hillary
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4 yr. ago
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It's funny, I thought all the Byrd shit went away once you dolts realized that he was a reformed racist who the NAACP rated as "100% pro-Civil Rights" and publicly mourned the death of. But I guess you conveniently just forgot all that?
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DavidTheAnimator
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4 yr. ago
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Thats also right around the time of the supposed party switch, meaning that you are wrong and LBJ cannot possibly be a racist because he was a Democrat after the party switch. Just kidding. That's really interesting, thanks.
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SCREECH95
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4 yr. ago
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Republican Southern strategy
another walkaway
idpol is winning issue and a great money maker. It's also simpler to shift responsibility to other pol parties.
kelsoATX
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4 yr. ago
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Fuck the party of slavery, the klan, Jim Crow, segregation, crippling welfare dependence, multi generational poverty and most of all fuck the democratic party and their racist identity politics.
walkaway
aoc
What she's in charge of? She only tweets and virtue signals, she's so useless and still so many sheep circlejerk around her, so pathetic.
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lifted_sloths
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2 yr. ago
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It’s the veneer of her youthfulness and loud voice always claiming everything is an outrage that garners so much attention. Definitely attracts the naive crowds that don’t do their own research
ted cruz aoc jan 21 bipartisan spat
How can she be so shallow and yet the depth of her stupidity remain unplumbed?
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trip k
with most of that and I 100% agree with the confederate flag part. Why does any American want to idolize the flag of traitors is crazy. Where I disagree is that the modern left has completely separated from klan like ideals. The ideals are similar but the targets and group have changed. I would say antifa and the klan share many many traits.
border rase
allinallitsjusta
• DontBanMeBecauseIAsk
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4 yr. ago
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But haven’t you heard? The correct way to win an argument this decade is to scream “RACIST” or “SEXIST” as loud as possible! It works every time!
4 yr. ago
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If you are looking for illegal immigrants on the southern border, what ethnicity are you looking for? I don't see the racism here. Sure, it isn't great policy and is pretty unfair, but I don't see anything that is blatantly racist about it.
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kingofthe2hole
Confused Leftist
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4 yr. ago
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https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/racism
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allinallitsjusta
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4 yr. ago
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Should they have been stopping 75 year old black grandmothers in the area too? 5 year old white kids? You can say that it is racism but people have limited resources and they know who is illegally crossing the border. Do we have to pretend like we don't?
Within the context it was clear he was talking about illegal immigrants.
Please tell me one thing about my "tirade" that is racist. It is an objective fact that the average Haitian is less educated than the average Japanese. It is an objective fact that Haiti has a far higher murder rate than Japan. It is an objective fact that Japanese society/infrastructure/education is more similar to America's than Haiti's.
I think perhaps an insult tantamount to "racist" should be created for those who are so blindly reductionist that they can't handle the truth, instead resorting to name-calling
deleted]
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4 yr. ago
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If he doesn't immediately disavow, he's a racist
If he does immediately disavow, he's lying to save face and is still a racist
If he disavows within a small time frame, he's an ineffectual President who's lying and is still a racist
Am I doing this right?
aoc cuffs
zhobelle
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2 mo. ago
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Crisis actor AOC.
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OzoneLaters
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2 mo. ago
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Politician provocateur.
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deep6it2
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2 mo. ago
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AOC=Always On Camera
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surferrosa1985
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2 mo. ago
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She's literally an actress
Detective51
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2 mo. ago
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Retired cop here, putting your hands behind your back when not instructed is NOT the best practice as stated by this moron. If you are a suspect, and are not cuffed for whatever reason, we want your hands visible so we can clearly see they are empty and not holding a threat. This is an absolute lie on her behalf. No cop is in favor of a suspect hiding their hands.
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freebirdls
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2 mo. ago
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So basically, AOC is spreading dangerous misinformation.
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saucynugs69
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2 mo. ago
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AOC is a danger to black lives
j biden pop
t's a poll by the Associated Press, for an Associated Press article. Likely bullshit.
Vote in person in November and drag everyone you know to the polls too.
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StMoneyx2
ULTRA Redpilled
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3 days ago
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After Trump effectively ended the Afgan war, they needed a new one. This maps out how they made it happen
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impeach
Careful saying that, it only takes the House to impeach. The Senate does their thing after the House impeaches.
Just impeached huh... you might want to add convicted because if Conservatives retake the house and a large chunk are Freedom Caucus he will be impeached. Most likely not convicted but will be impeached
ago
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Waste of time. Once we take back the house and actually have a chance of passing things like this, all of this strong talk from grifters like Graham and MJT will go away. Republicans only seem to have a spine when they have no way of passing anything, then they do absolutely fuck all once the have control.
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Jj biden support
am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.
https://nypost.com/2022/09/14/this-is-the-moment-i-gave-up-on-joe-biden/
Ugaymyguy
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14 days ago
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I gave up on him when Roe was overturned and he attacked the SCOTUS. And he dares to call pro-lifers like me extremists, and a threat to the Republic, when he wants to reform the Court, which is the backbone of our Republic. Joe Biden and his Democrat cronies are threats to the Republic. That is why we cannot, I repeat, not blow these midterms.
sep 1 speech
So tell me what Trump said that comes even close to Biden's "everyone who doesn't vote for me a threat"
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t0b1nsQ
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28 days ago
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Serious question, what did Trump do to split USA? He was constantly saying that americans should be the first priority for the US, but I might be wrong?
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Fuck Joe Biden and anyone that voted and supports the divisive POS.
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[deleted]
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28 days ago
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No-Establishment8367
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28 days ago
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In what ways was Trump divisive? The only division I ever saw was the media twisting (e.g. “very fine people” hoax) or outright lying (e.g. his comments about MS-13 being animals) about his words.
Trump wasn’t divisive, the media portrayed him that way so that simple minded people would perceive him as divisive.
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fbi raids
flyingdeadthing
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21 days ago
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The KGB west office is pretty busy it seems
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1
1One_Two2
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21 days ago
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Vee vill ask tha vestions!
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HaleOfAPatriot
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21 days ago
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They’re looking pretty hard for all the evidence that they were complicit with Russiagate. They didn’t find it at Mar-a-lago
They have to make sure they get all the copies of the laptops that Hunter Biden and Anthony Weiner had.
Between those two laptops, there is dirt on every Democrat in the country.
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FarVision5
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21 days ago
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Someone somewhere better of dead dropped all that shit off in the onions somewhere
I can't possibly imagine that forensic copy of the laptop stayed in that computer shop
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Sea_Cloud_1708
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21 days ago
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Is this true??? Seems like this would be getting more attention….
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swohio
Redpilled
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21 days ago
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More attention from who, the media that is part of the left that is doing this?
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fentanyl guns
ey don't care because the more doped up people, the better.
And also the less guns the better.
Both are forms of control.
I have mild or borderline OCD and thus I have a few fetishes
Anti morality, human rights, contrarian,
and whether attacking "liberal democracy" is an exclusively far right idea.tankiejerk
dark mutualism
ansynd https://libcom.org/article/anarchosyndicalism-against-fascism-response-recent-insinuations
I reject organizationalism, which means by this, I reject the idea that any organization can represent exploited individuals or groups, social struggle, revolution or even anarchy. By extension this leads to me also rejecting of all formal organizations such as parties, unions, federations.
This is because their programmatic nature they take on such a representative role. This doesn’t mean I reject of the ability to organize the specific activities that are necessary to the revolutionary struggle, but it is instead me rejecting the subjection of the organization of tasks and projects to the formalism of an organizational program. The only task that was ever shown to require formal organization is the development and maintenance of a formal organization.
.
I am against collectivist moralism which includes the Atntiracist
cruelty, vengeance, and hatred.
compassion for others is rejected as moralistic
This cones out of my non support of humanism and me being against urban modernism, anti-moralist
I am not down with ideology, or of every program, idea, abstraction, ideal or theory that is placed above life and individuals as a construct that is to be served. I pretty much am shedding my attachments to all theories entirely or at least in ways that can be seen in this blog
This means I reject the State (i.e nation), the identity, etc., but also of Anarchism, Primitivism, Communism, Freedom, Reason, the Individual, etc. when these become ideals to which one is to sacrifice one’s self, desires, aspirations, dreams.
I support the use of ideas, theoretical analysis and reasoned capacity to think abstractly and critically as tools for realizing one’s aims, for reappropriating life and for opposing everything that stands in the way of this reappropriation. I reject simple answers that come to act as blinders to one’s attempts to examine the reality one is facing in favor of ongoing questioning and theoretical exploration.
emp w home abuse
derad normal til recently c crist dont vote me state soca marx lenin
Thomas Sowell says that the modern Leftists do not find their opponents in error, but in sin. To them, the Right is not merely wrong or mistaken in their political ideology, but somehow evil for having one at variance with theirs. Moreover, being “woke” is a like being in a religion with no path for redemption. No matter how right your thinking, you will always be wrong due to past failings.
federalist article
https://web.archive.org/web/20160903135133/http://proudboymagazine.com/open-letter-to-the-dnc/
If Third Way economics would be applied to his educational views and reform ideas I would want less flexible Third Way economics to be applied to his educational views and reform ideas instead of mainstream Third Way economics being applied to them
I don't believe all people who are against gay rights are doing so out of hate. They aren't going to overturn gay rights laws anyway so leave the few people against gay rights for non hate reasons alone. Live and let live
Even if I didn’t feel that way or I got ‘hit on the head’ causing me to be non supportive of gay marriage as long as the 14th Amendment exists I can’t get on board with or supporting the 2015 gay marriage ruling being overturned since the 14th Amendment is an excuse to keep gay marriage legal (since gays can say that due to that amendment gay marriage could have been legalized as early as the mid late 19th century)
I am indulgent and forbearing with gay marriage being legal because I realize that gays themselves (most gay rights activists were gays) correctly forced gay marriage to be legal instead of wrongly relying on heterosaviorism and hetereo politicians ‘evolving’ on that issue to make gay marriage be legal. I further feel this way because I realize that the majority if voters who voted to legalize gay marriage were gays themselves. So gays wanted gay marriage to be legal and they made it happen the correct way .
If some of my trans views trigger pro trans people or trans people,
Straight pride is based
is :
However, I would never tell gays they are wrong to be gay and that they should be straight. My reason is, I've had friends who were bullied in school and me seeing those challenges my friends faced made me want to break down barriers for others who were similarily oppressed including gays. If we tell gays they are wrong or that they should be straight, that would go against those objectives. If Christians want to criticize gays, they first need to get the beam out of their own eye before doing so. A big reason I support gay rights (beside the fact that I am Anarcho Libertarian), is because one of my friends was discriminated against as a child and teen due to their ADHD, being the new kid etc, so I strongly empathize with what gays feel when they are discriminated against. Because of that I am Pro gay.
I respect the 2015 Supreme court gay marriage decision since a gay person himself (Obergfell), legalized gay marriage via his court case as opposed to it being done via cancel culture, negative petitions where most signers are non gay, gay saviorism etc.
I
Since I am a Constitutionist , Tankie and Social Libertarian I would not be amused or thrilled at all if the Respect for Marriage Act was passed since if the 2015 ruling gets overturned (which it really shouldn’t if you think about it), a case can be made that it should go to the states.
https://books.google.com/books?id=VMZHuyK5NTsC&lpg=PP1&pg=PA1#v=onepage&q&f=false
I am against repartitions to gays for anti gay discrimination. I am against Indiana’s Religious Freedom law primarily because it allows people to use religion as an excuse to not follow the law
I believe that psycho analysis provides good insight into gays and is an extremely better alternative to gay conversion therapy
I am against criminalizing people being gay. It's the 21st century not the 19th century.
I am strongly against Affirmative Action and quotas for gays as that is contrary to my values
https://praxeology.net/MR1-1-S16-GOODMAN.pdf
hgfggggggg
It is hard and complicated to find true healthcare solutions. We need to dig deep to examines policies and offer impactful solutions. Health is a human right, while we also need more of a nuanced and individualistic mindset that sets the US apart from Western Europe.
I support free healthcare for children 2 and 4 years of age and children between 9 and 24 months to help prevent child morality
At minimum, in our current static capitalistic society, I want a common sense, bipartisan, expansion of Medicare as long as it has unorganized (as in unorganized sector of India unorganized) elements to it that replaced the privatized elements in it and would be the type of Medicare that the Democrat Party Libertarians would support
I support the ForcetheVote since we were in a health crisis and needed better access to healthcare. In our current static capitalistic society, I still support Medicare for All as the most simple way to fix our health insurance issues
I am mixed (for, against, not for but non hostile to) to abstain on whether the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) with a public option and modest bipartisan adjustments and provisions is better in the present and near future than Universal Healthcare
Like Liz Warren, I realize that if we are still stuck in our current static capitalistic society and can’t get Medicare for All passed, we should this below
We use the Australia inspired public option model for the US but with a change to eventually guide us to a NHS UK type state run healthcare model before we abolish the state
If you are one of those people (like a worker, and or young and or healthy etc) who doesn’t need expensive private insurance you can receive quality , health care (via a free trial model) using a healthcare version of the bad bank model , fused with this healthcare model and a voluntarist peer to peer model
However, if you like your private insurance, you’re financially secure, you have specific needs that aren’t covered by the plan above, or you simply don’t trust the healthcare plan above, then you have every right to keep your private insurance.
This plan would disassociate health from employment which is good because healthcare should not be a factor in picking the right job, (my dad was forced to keep his job to get us quality healthcare and that should not be the case for workers), and incentivize regulators to negotiate transparent and affordable drug and treatment prices, prioritizing people over big Pharma.
I believe the “Medicare for All Who Want It with a change” model reflects where Americans are and if our country does a better job delivering healthcare than the private providers deliver, we could ultimately shift to a certain type of single payer system
Then I’d like to see the US implement a post statist-early mid 1920s to early mid 1930s Social Democracy transitional healthcare system
This transitional healthcare system would include compulsory healthcare for private employees and their family members fused with Big Medicine healthcare-Single payer healthcare (that is publicly subsidized) then incrementally or gradually move toward a nationalized, free medical healthcare system (when a certain level of wealth is obtained in our country so that there is no reason for a country not to create such a system, why should people have to pay if they are sick or need medical help?)
This transitional healthcare system would at least give off an appearance of autonomy
I support the healthcare system (and upgrades to that system) that the UK government has had (and made) since the leadership of Tony Blair
Then I would want us to implement state controlled, NHS like healthcare (with privatization) in the US like they have in the UK (until we abolish the government). In particular with clinical commissioning groups to replace our health care (with Social Care Act 2012 elements)
This American version of the NHS healthcare (with privatization) model would through medical improvement and civic liberty, the state would guide (in a non intrusive way) peoples health during their lifetime to keep as many people as possible in good health to create a truly healthy and spiritual nation bmuslni fash 3p tm mzgr
It would be ideal if people had to earn it Starship Troopers style i.e by doing something for the community or through mutual aide (but certainly not a deal breaker as long as the nationalized healthcare is innovative) serve am
For non essential health and medical things along with cosmetic surgeries I can live with private and consumer driven social insurance policies (but so that people who don't need it don't get it)
There would be a Nationalized Affordable Healthcare act for non essential health and medical things along with cosmetic surgeries that border on being essential health -medical things and cosmetic surgeries
Plus this would offer free reeducation for radical right or alt right people
In this Marxism Leninism (post Dengist) society (like in modern China) workers' unions are under state management (but some of them would be corporate instead but cede much freedom to strike in exchange for the state assuming the role of negotiator between conflicting interests) there would be healthcare that is between the free healthcare under Peronism and the current healthcare model in China
ultranar comm bbbol
bleed heart lib
34
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jjijjijijijiiij
Grillpill Extremist
118d
Whether or not this is what the theory says (people always say real intersectionality doesn't mean that when you criticize it)
Intersectionality just says that types of oppression such as sexism and racism have a multiplying effect which results in a unique and even more extreme type of oppression. The only framework used to relate different types of oppression is an immaterial hierarchy of social dominance. Standpoint theory makes things exponentially worse because it presumes only people experiencing discrimination can understand it. Therefore to undo systems of oppression you have to listen to the most oppressed people even if it is just the 0.5%. However, who is the most oppressed is an unresolved question and
sparklypinktutu
Flair-evading Lib 💩
117d
So originally it was specifically used to describe the experience of black women, whose experience of racism (in the 80s!) was different from black men, and whose experience of misogyny was different than white women’s, and “adding those experiences together” didn’t make sense to accurately describe their experiences.
Like for example, black men face racism by being considered “thuggish” or “bad workers,” and white women experience misogyny by being considered “weak” or “for the home,” but nobody considered black women “thuggish” and they weren’t given the relevant “benefit” of benevolent sexism to be considered “above” or “too delicate for” working and therefore better served as homemakers.
Instead, they were seen as too sexual, too emotional, but also angry and strong. The contradictions between how blackness in the “default” male was seen and femaleness in the “default” white made it such that simply adding black and female together wouldn’t paint the full picture.
^ this is all from my degree. Of course the new libs have reversed this idea such that it’s incoherent
mean the common enemy is capitalism, even if they don't recognize it as such. Intersectionality was originally in line with marxist beliefs, but was ripped away from it as time wore on and the ideology was co-opted by liberals.
class reductionism + intersectionality
Always best to see theory in practise.
By the fruits you shall know them.
My own milquetoast (and five minute) critique is that it is a tool by liberal elite academics to unite a very diverse political group and this naturally causes a lot of friction within the coalition. Diversity might have some advantages, but cohesion is not one of them.
All politics boil down to out-group vs. in-group and via this lense the in-group are the oppressed (should mention perception rule all, you merely have to appear marginalized to be counted as the in-group).
There's a lot of power plays by various groups and individuals to vie for the highest positions and because of their foundations this is about being the biggest victim, people call it the oppression olympics for a reason.
The fractures become especially obvious when harm is done to an internal group and can't be blamed on the outgroup. Like if black people attack asians, or when low class brown men harrass women, etc.
Naturally the opposition tries its best to use these contradictions to split the enemy's base. And the Progressives try to combat this by keeping a lid on internal infighting by giving them a common enemy in the white majority.
And the Progressives try to combat this by keeping a lid on internal infighting by giving them a common enemy in the white majority.
which chases a lot of white people completely into reactionary politics
Nobody likes to be blamed for things they didn't do, but everyone has a scapegoat. For American liberals that is white people, and men to a lesser degree. Even when collective identity is taken into account they clearly pin a lot of shit on these groups that other ('their own') groups do just as much or more.
It why you see absurd claims that the two sex categories we have is some european invention, as if the majority of the world, save some minor cultures, haven't done the same divison of humanity.
But 'whiteness' (white people themselves being the creator and original carriers of this sin) serves as a metaphorical evil force in the liberal and to some extent leftist worldview and so everything seen as bad must originate from it. It's like christians seeing the hand of satan in every misfortune.
Intersectionality is another word for identity politics. The purpose of identity politics is to divide everyone. It does no good, it changes nothing, and identity politics makes the left completely impotent, because the ideology of idpol says you have to do it all the time to the exclusion of all other values.
The fact that large corporations are now pushing this is highly suspicious to say the least.
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bleer95
COVID Turboposter 💉🦠😷
117d
intersectionality might be even worse than traditional identity politics. With traditional identity politics you can just have various blocs that act discretely. That's still bad, but at least there's coherence. With intersectionality it's literally just too many variables to account for and the inevitable progressive stack that will piss people off. You're not going to tell the majority of hispanics that they have to shut up and be defined by the concerns of trans latinx bodies. the average black person is not going to be shut up so that an immigrant lesbian black woman can speak over them. To the degree that "Asian" is even a coherent term, the Asian community is not going to accept racial affirmative action if it fucks them over, and they aren't going to be defined by half black Asians because most Asians aren't half black.
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mhl67
Trotskyist ☭
117d
Idk if anyone has written a book or anything about it. My own personal take is that it's just a crappy take on the existing concept of solidarity, except that intersectionality only pays lip service to class struggle.
Reminder that California's anti-gay marriage ballot prop narrowly passed in 2008 because of an increase in black voter turnout for Obama.
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Abiv23
Normal Dude 🏈
118d
I lived in CA at the time and a lot of people voted Yes thinking it was in favor of gay marriage instead of repealing it
It was horribly worded on the ballot too
I am convinced that is why it failed
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there was nothing he could do. primary politics in america are poisoned because you have to cater everything to the least representative factions of the two parties and the media, which includes genuine ethnonarcisists and flighty PMC attention whores among Dems and freakshow evangelicals and race nationalists among republicans.
bleer95
COVID Turboposter 💉🦠😷
116d
Honestly I'm not sure what would have been the most beneficial way to respond to that. Tell them to piss off... you look better suited for the general election, but there's now a nonstop media narrative of how Sanders social democratic views are really just about medicare4whites. Do what he did and we saw the result.
MadeUAcctButIEatedIt
Rightoid 🐷
118d
The weird thing is it worked.
I've been meaning to make a separate post for this but seriously - how did we go from "stop police killings of unarmed black men" to the no-less-incontrovertible-but-tangentially-related-at-best "black trans lives matter?" Like, how did that gain traction, and among whom? I'm sure the average cop isn't the most sensitive - despite the mandatory training - about gender identities and sex work is valid, etc. But is anyone even trying to claim that trans people are criminalized anything like black men are? And if not what are we even talking about?
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senove2900
Economically totalitarian, socially libertarian
117d
how did we go from "stop police killings of unarmed black men" to the no-less-incontrovertible-but-tangentially-related-at-best "black trans lives matter?"
How do any of these issues go from initially reasonable demands to ever more niche, inscrutable and unwinnable ones? because of internal competition within the activist/grifter class.
To emerge as an activist leader and gain clout (which is all many of these people want), and even more to emerge as a grifter and get actual money, you have two paths:
tirelessly work an actionable issue, which takes years and is far from guaranteed to lead you anywhere
take over the current structure by leveraging even more extreme idpol to denounce and replace the current leaders
Those who choose the first are constantly at risk of being displaced by the second, so the evolutionary equilibrium of idpol moments is for constant infighting and purity spiralling (which you see among rightoids too).
It certainly didn’t gain traction because people give a shit about black trans lives. But in the mind of the affluent white liberal, the idea of someone being black AND trans is basically a combination of the two most oppressed minorities, and therefore putting “black trans lives matter” in your twitter bio will get you twice as many woke brownie points as the usual blm or trans rights
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It seems like classic liberal conceit - all of these pet issues that you patronize and support, and the assumption that they all get along with each other . . . and can't understand when they don't.
"What do you mean Native Americans probably aren't keen on gun laws?"
"What do you mean Black Baptists or Muslim immigrants aren't keen on LGBT issues?"
Lol, a race nationalist will always non-queer friendly, or is there any example thats contradict my statement
7
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blooper2021
117d
IIRC woke brownie points are quadratic in the oppression input, so you’d in fact get 4x P_woke
deleted]
330d
The grassroots bits of BLM have been completely overshadowed by the corporate BLM, so my guess is the Dems will use it just like any other corporate sponsorships.
I fully expect BLM to come back full swing in the next election cycle.
Yeah some individual chapters actually do good work. Some of them have attended and supported recent union drives, set up food pantries, just generally good stuff. Meanwhile, the ceo is buying a million dollar ranch in California
all.
Think like a union.
BLM never had any of that. It was always about propaganda, black hat and dark money. Always.
17
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mynie
330d
This was the big lie of Occupy, and it springs from the dumber strains of academic political theories. Basically, the assertion is that any type of clear institutional structure is hierarchical and therefore oppressive. Instead, we need to fully non-hierarchical; no leadership, not even any clear roles.
Nevermind that such an approach to group work is extremely difficult to pull off even if we're talking about a halfdozen people who know each other; we can surely get it work with a group made up of a couple hundred strangers!
The result was predictable and bleak: anytime anyone gets too close to accomplishing anything, their efforts can be halted by claims that they're not being democratic enough. The people who didn't bother showing up to the last 7 meetings have some serious concerns about why they weren't consulted on this project, there's too many whites or men working on the project, etc etc.
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idw_h8train
guláškomunismu s lidskou tváří
330d
The irony of it all is that the progressive stack basically imposed a hierarchical structure on occupy: the most marginalized may speak first and dominate the discussion, and maybe, if there's time left over, can others less marginalized speak. Albeit a structure with none of the benefits of hierarchies in the first place: clear accountability, clear points of communication during action or times of confusion, and better delegation of specific responsibilities or expertise
And, BLM was originally about police violence and abuse more broadly, not racially exclusive. Summer 2020 was the turning point for me, when DSA set up a march through my hometown that was explicitly racial --to attend you were required to march with a "black ally" whatever that is and carry a sign with the name of a black person killed by police. This is in a state that is 99% white, has more Asians than black people, and most of the black people here are foreign born/refugees. And this is in a town where a mentally ill white man was murdered by police less than a year prior!! So I find it incredibly suspicious. It's almost like DSA and BLM is acting as a containment mechanism, and one of the reasons is to prevent cross racial solidarity. Police violence is way up here in the last decade but pretty much all the victims have been white. Not to mention nationwide, the sheer number of whites killed dwarfs black people. Yeah I get that black people suffer disproportionately. But why no mention of police violence as a class issue, as a POOR people issue. Obviously the liberals took this movement and neutered it. What happened to the original BLM organizers again?
(I still have the email if you want proof, it was so weird DSA did this, I honestly don't know if they're just out of touch or this shit is deliberate)
(social corporatism) doigetawigtho
@
330d
Imagine thinking it's good political strategy to LIMIT ATTENDANCE at a march.
183
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PixelBlock
“But what is an education *worth*?” 🎓
330d
You forget, part of the driving force here is the exclusivity and purity politics. Being the only one correct enough to attend must make you a naturally better ally !
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[deleted]
330d
I can partially understand - they are probably vulnerable to the same phenomenon left-wing movements are prone to, where any organisation eventually gets taken over by well-spoken, well-educated upper middle class white men at the expense of the target demographic, who end up being told what they are supposed to want out of their struggle.
I mean how many times have workers' movements been taken over by overbearing but well-meaning intellectuals? This was so much of a problem that by the 2010s only the intellectuals remained and the actual workers all support someone else.
BLM was originally about police violence and abuse more broadly, not racially exclusive.
I actually support BLM in the context you describe, but it definitely didn't start that way. Race is literally in its name 22
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BLMers got mad at me for talking about the minimum wage at a march of theirs, like black people don't work for wages or something.
more reply
[deleted]
330d
That is indeed quite disturbing.
21
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zoombafoom
@
330d
I honestly wonder if DSA is controlled opposition a lot of the time. Especially after a Sudanese friend who moved here told me as much.
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FunKick9595
Marxist 🧔
330d
They are essentially a recruiting wing of the DNC for young people at this point.
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TadMcZee-1
🌑💩 Socially moderate SocDem covidiot 1
330d
Really to me they’re “woke-cialist,” they just keep woke young people in particular voting democrat
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FunKick9595
Marxist 🧔
330d
Kinda. I would have never thought of a socialist organization being primarily focused on wokeness but it seems that they focus on that more than economics.
They seem to function as a way to capture economic leftist sentiment and redirect it to identity politics and therefore the democrats.
To be fair, that describes most of American activist culture
29
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CntPntUrMom
Eco-Socialist 🌳
330d
BLMers got mad at me for talking about the minimum wage at a march of theirs, like black people don't work for wages or something.
FunKick9595
Marxist 🧔
330d
The one organized March in DC I went to in summer 2020 was mostly young white women (upper middle class), then white men, then woc, but almost no black men...
It was kinda telling that the victims that the rally was mainly advocating for were not there.
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punitance
Anarcho-Monarchist
330d
When all the organizing happens in or near college campuses that's what'll happen. Even the Black guys who are involved are going to be involved through groups like Alpha Phi Alpha or other groups organized by their own communities rather than DSA.
One thing White Leftists need to learn is that groups that are solely designed to "do politics" are destined to attract self-righteous wreckers by their nature. More effective activism happens with groups that are not explicitly political, but get involved in agitating around political issues that affect them. That gets participation from normal-ass people who want to make a tangible difference instead of weirdos who get too invested in semiotics.
For example, labor unions are primarily about addressing issues with your workplace. Big picture politics is part of it, but it's a teeny tiny part. Good ones also host social events and, in the old days, they also used to directly administer workman's comp and insurance plans and publish newspapers (not just a newsletter for the membership)
Well, of course. They're all getting shot at by the police. Who has time for a rally, when you're dodging bullets?!
to attend you were required to march with a "black ally" whatever that is and carry a sign with the name of a black person killed by police
"Guys, you need to bring a black person to use as a prop in order to attend our super speshul march"
peak DSA
Regardless, the police state is a working class issue first and foremost. Reframing it as only being a racial issue only helps the police state in the end.
And this is in a town where a mentally ill white man was murdered by police less than a year prior!!
This is as good a segue as any I guess.
This is as good a segue as any I guess.
up to 50% of the people police murder are disabled https://archive.is/gE01l
This is not a race issue. I'd repeat that after every point, but I'm not an irritating woke, so just keep it in mind.
police shoot people twice as often as previously thought. https://www.vice.com/en_ca/article/xwvv3a/shot-by-cops
Keep in mind that this was self-reported, so we have no way of knowing if these numbers speak to the actual number of shootings in the US. Many of these people are completely unarmed. Police kill far, far more people than terrorists in the US and have killed over a hundred people more than mass shooters did in 2019 that we are aware of. Mass shooters are easily tracked. Police killings are not. 1 https://archive.is/rwRJ5 2 https://www.fbi.gov/file-repository/active-shooter-incidents-in-the-us-2019-042820.pdf/view
Oh, and cops also killed more people in 2019 than school shooters did in all of US history. https://archive.is/fZp9V
And if they don't shoot you, they might just airstrike your block and burn your children alive. https://archive.is/mNjqB
They also shoot one dog every hour, every day. At the absolute least. https://archive.is/UtPiG
Once you're in jail, be prepared to sit there for weeks -or months or years. It's so bad that people constantly plead guilty just so they can get out https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/innocent-man-pleaded-guilty-drug-charge-get-out-jail-it-n1067321. It's so bad and so common, in fact, that over a third of all exonerations come after an individual has pleaded guilty. So much for the right to a speedy trial, huh? https://www.law.umich.edu/special/exoneration/Documents/Exonerations%20in%202018.pdf
And getting arrested is easy - tens of thousands of people yearly, in fact, thanks to lowest bidder garbage that police departments use in order to test for illicit substances. Field drug tests are about as reliable as lie detector tests or horoscopes. They just don't work.
https://www.propublica.org/article/common-roadside-drug-test-routinely-produces-false-positives
Think you're safe if you just follow directions? Yeah, no. http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2017/12/graphic-video-shows-police-killing-of-unarmed-man-in-arizona.html And if they don't just outright kill you, they could make their instructions so arcane and hard to follow https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OflGwyWcft8 that they'll kill you for not following them, and they'll usually get away with it. He got away with it, by the way. Surprise! Oh, and for anyone who thought justice might be done in the future, here's an update to that case - years later, the insane officer with "You're Fucked" emblazoned on the dust cover of his rifle is now getting a monthly check of $2,500 for life from the city because murdering a man in cold blood made him sad. Poor baby. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lmTv1Tb9UBY
They'll prosecute you for even knowing about crimes cops have committed. https://boingboing.net/2019/02/26/list-of-thousands-of-criminal.html
Think you're safe in your home? lmao nah. Not even your 7 year old is safe from getting her brains blown out. check out this horrifying megapost on no-knock raids https://archive.is/quFI4
Being a taxi driver is literally more dangerous than being a cop. https://thinkprogress.org/how-dangerous-is-it-to-be-a-cop-heres-what-the-data-says-c07f6a58d8fc/
cops are more of a danger to themselves than anyone else is to them https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2018/04/11/officers-firefighters-suicides-study/503735002/
they've admitted to stealing as much -or recently more- than burglars through "asset forfeiture," and the rate of their thefts has been climbing yearly https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/11/23/cops-took-more-stuff-from-people-than-burglars-did-last-year/. Keep in mind, these numbers only articulate what's been reported. It's probable that they've stolen far more than just this.
police are literally allowed to rape people on the job in 35 states, as they have the power to determine whether or not you consented to sex with them while in their custody. And they have used this "right." https://archive.is/ue0oB
the police are being trained to kill as if they're an occupying army and we're an insurgency. this is an inevitability, as the military-industrial complex needs to keep expanding into new markets. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ETf7NJOMS6Y
Eugenics was still alive and well in the prison-industrial complex up until very recently, and could very well be continuing for all we know, as it was forcibly sterilizing inmates as late as 2010. I honestly don't see a reason to believe it's stopped. https://archive.is/yr01P
Feel like putting in a complaint yet? Lol good luck. You might get jailed, beaten, or worse. Watch 2 minutes and you'll want to see the whole damn thing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=16&v=vnJ5f1JMKns&feature=emb_logo
The US surveillance state is massive https://qz.com/1670686/the-us-has-a-lot-in-common-with-chinas-surveillance-state/ (and while this post primarily focuses on the US, other countries are just as bad https://www.theverge.com/2016/11/23/13718768/uk-surveillance-laws-explained-investigatory-powers-bill), though much of our surveillance is privatized. This doesn't stop the police from partnering with private companies, however https://archive.is/bL5fT. This will only get worse as time goes on. Also, we can't forget about the Patriot Act and Snowden's PRISM leaks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_(surveillance_program.
the police, as an institution, are so completely steeped in violence, that up to 40% of them commit acts of domestic violence and other forms of domestic abuse http://womenandpolicing.com/violencefs.asp. Most citizens are not even allowed to own firearms if found guilty of domestic violence, and these guys are expected to handle military-grade equipment.
Police exist to control and terrorize us, not serve and protect us. That's only their function if you happen to be rich and powerful. https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-day-ferguson-cops-were-caught-in-a-bloody-lie
https://abcnews.go.com/US/court-oks-barring-high-iqs-cops/story?id=95836
If it were an individual thing, you'd give them the benefit of the doubt, but it isn't; it's an institutional thing. the job itself is a bastard, therefore by carrying out the job, they are bastards. To take it to an extreme: there were no good members of the gestapo because there was no way to carry out the directives of the gestapo and to be a good person. it is the same with the american police state. Police do not exist to protect and serve, according to the US supreme court itself, but to dominate, control, and terrorize in order to maintain the interests of state and capital. https://archive.is/gHlb4
Who are the good cops then? The ones who either quit or are fired for refusing to do the job. https://archive.is/lZrC5
While the above list focuses on the US as a model police state, ALL cops in ALL countries are derivative from very similar violent traditions of modern policing, rooted in old totalitarian regimes, genocides, and slavery, if not the mere maintenance of authoritarian power structures through terrorism. https://archive.is/xhZOu
https://archive.is/xhZOu
TadMcZee-1
🌑💩 Socially moderate SocDem covidiot 1
330d
As with any left-wing movement, idpol is a buzzsaw, it kneecaps anything regardless of the underlying issues
TadMcZee-1
🌑💩 Socially moderate SocDem covidiot 1
330d
As with any left-wing movement, idpol is a buzzsaw, it kneecaps anything regardless of the underlying issues
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PlotnikMatros
Anarcho-Communist
330d
BLM wasn't so much coopted by liberals, as it was a movement that had ideological diversity from the beginning- hence why people can look at the same movement and either see cringey allyship-obsessed liberals who'll cry "peaceful protest" at anyone trying to shield their face from a cop's boot, or on the other hand see the movement as a sea of black youth and black-bloc'd anarchists smashing every police camera they can see. These represent conflicting visions within the broader movement against police brutality.
There were always different camps- the national leaders, local nonprofit-driven activists who tried to control and contain the movement, local grassroots activists from the families of the murdered, Stalinists trying to turn the movement into a front group for themselves, anarchists seeing in the movement another potential partner in their long-held abolitionist politics, Black nationalists and hoteps quarelling with the younger and more queer black generation, and so on and so forth.
As the movement gt really popular again in 2020, in many places, the most liberal allyship stuff was front and center. But in many places where the movement had been running hot for years, its longest veterans recognize the framework of allyship to be anti-solidaristic and to basically reinforce state power
deleted]
330d
It was grassroots until the grassroots leaders were murdered.
5
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rootbeer_cigarettes
Radical shitlib ✊🏻:soy:
330d
I would like to see that proof.
1
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[deleted]
330d
https://imgur.com/a/q4zsnWr
Let me know if link works? Hope ppl can understand why I chose not to attend. Considering a white man with mental illness was murdered in this sleepy town the previous summer. He wasn't even threatening anyone, just walking around with an airsoft pistol at 4 AM. Obviously in a mental health crisis. Given all the police killings of WHITES in this state, I find the racial exclusivity of DSA here quite tasteless. I did get to see the March from my window and it was mostly high school kids that showed up, much much less people than turned out for the women's march but that may also be explained by ppl being worried about corona
MayCauseThought
bleeder
330d
The original BLM "organizers" are all living in million dollar houses right now.
BLM was never a grassroots movement. It never had any real on the ground leadership scheme, no real accountability, nothing. It was all a means for black money and propaganda.
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[deleted]
330d
It was grassroots until the grassroots leaders were murdered
Let me know if link works? Hope ppl can understand why I chose not to attend. Considering a white man with mental illness was murdered in this sleepy town the previous summer. He wasn't even threatening anyone, just walking around with an airsoft pistol at 4 AM. Obviously in a mental health crisis. Given all the police killings of WHITES in this state, I find the racial exclusivity of DSA here quite tasteless. I did get to see the March from my window and it was mostly high school kids that showed up, much much less people than turned out for the women's march but that may also be explained by ppl being worried about corona.
This is what happens when you give up all your leverage to the Democrats and Wall Street.
131
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elwombat
occasional good point maker
330d
All of these grassroots movements get absorbed into one of the larger political groups. It happened with the Tea Party too. There is just too much money and power at the top, and it corrupts the leadership of these groups into bending the knee.
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Foshizzy03
Democratic Socialist 🚩
330d
The tea party was very successful though. If you're talking about the specific moment that the tea party was a thing, you're right, they were absorbed and integrated into the party. But the Tea Parties ideas stuck around and became the first wave of Steve Bannons/Breitbarts anti immigration republicans which was headlines by Trump. What people on here and a lot of liberals fail to understand is that the Tea Party was for Republicans who were tired of candidates like Romney and McCain winning primaries. Working class conservatives hated them. I know because my dad was one.
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Tacky-Terangreal
Socialist Her-storian
330d
Idk if they have as much of a direct line to trump. Those types are hardcore anti government and trump was even mocking other candidates who took Koch money.
Maybe they're finally realizing that BLM Corporate did nothing productive with the shitloads of donated money it accumulated during Trump's reign.
The media was complicit in building these narratives. Take the shooting of Rayshard Brooks. The guy is driving around drunk, then parks his car in a Wendy's drive-through lane and passes out. Police get him to move to the parking lot and do a breathalyzer, find out he's drunk, go to cuff him and he punches them, grabs one of their tazers, shoots one of them with the tazer, then tries to shoot the other with the tazer and gets shot.
The New York Times headline after this happened? "Atlanta Police Chief Resigns After Officer Shoots and Kills Black Man"
Idk that’s an edge case. The guy just stole a stupid taser. Just put a warrant out for his arrest for Pete’s sake. He probably wouldn’t have hurt anyone but himself because he was so wasted. The fact that the first instinct for cops is to shoot people as they run away, even if they aren’t that immediately dangerous, is really troubling
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comrade_rusty
@ 1
330d
And if he used the taser to steal the officers weapon? Once someone escalates, you have no idea how far they’ll take it, or what they’ll do to evade arrest after that point
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kummybears
Free r/worldnews mod Ghislaine Maxwell!
330d
The Jacob Blake incident definitely did not help out. Especially with how media hungry he was. It made people supporting him seem delusional.
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fujiste
🌘💩 Intersectional 💦Cummunist💦 2
330d
tfw you scuffle with the cops while they're trying to arrest you for a sexual assault charge, shrug off a taser, then try to stab a cop and get shot for it, and Momala tells you she's "proud of you"
You’re gonna have to be more specific about the case you’re talking about so I can inform myself, but as is tradition with idpol I suspect that is a fringe case that only had fringe lefty idpol support with the reactionary idpol rightoids seething over it as is tradition. The overwhelming majority of the fence sitters do not fit either catagory so I doubt that had any sway.
BLM has peak idpol in its leadership but due to the nature of social media ‘awareness’ and protests 90+% of BLM supporters don’t know who the leadership of BLM ™ are. People who support BLM might have changed their profile pic and maybe went to one of the huge George Floyd protests and saw the videos.
trymepal
🌗 3
330d
Thanks for providing that. Based on the context, this looks more like mob mentality than anything I said. But the point still stands. The only people protesting this death was a few hundred people, people who were already in a mob mentality due to the ongoing protests at the time in Minneapolis. For the record the news source you posted says an officer did have their gun drawn before his death, not that it matters. It’s not that crazy to hear a gunshot, see cops with guns out and a dead black man on the ground, then assume the police shot him.
Fringe localized support like this didn’t sway public opinion much in the grand scheme of things as by this point the fastest swing in support from neutral to opposition had already happened, although this certainly could have contributed to the gradual loss of support that’s happened over the past year.
That thread demonstrates the exact rightoid reaction I’m talking about. Comments are acting like this localized mob represents the entire left, or how this represents a large segment of society and their utter ignorance of everything to do with race relations. Rightoids get bonus points for the black language-based racism in the comments there
PlotnikMatros
Anarcho-Communist
330d
The false rumors riot ended pretty much as soon as it became clear that it was a false rumor and he had committed suicide, though. There had been some ongoing violence in downtown that evening because while the story was still coming out, the police started pushing on the angry crowd and a fight broke out.
So, there was a bout of violence that night as people let out the still simmering anger they felt after the Uprising- a lot of resentment was still in the air, not only over the death of George Floyd, but over the brutal collective punishment campaigns the cops had run in Twin Cities neighborhoods in the final days of the riots following his murder, and over the ways the cops had been gassing, beating, and bulldozing homeless camps in the park, pulling the blue flu on actual violent crime in the city, and generally acting vindictive and vengeful towards the black community.
There was sporadic looting downtown, and the cops pushed the crowd out of downtown into a fairly working-class (largely black and east-African) neighborhood, which they then let the crowd do what they would to- during riots, the MPD just protects the rich neighborhoods, as a consistent pattern. Most of the crowd left and didn't touch the neighborhood. A few pissed off youth (probably from another part of the city who didn't realize they'd been pushed out of the gentrified area) kept smashing stuff until the locals- most of whom are supporters of the broader movement- came out and told them to stop.
The day after the false rumors riot, there was lingering anger over the long standing grievances, but nobody felt like coming out to march over the shooting the day before. People generally accepted that it had been a suicide.
What will be the impact?
Absolutely nothing, just like there was no impact to people supporting them in the first place.
The whole affair is a circus sideshow.
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CueBallJoe
🌘💩 🌗 Special Ed 😍 2
330d
...oooooof freaks here in this hopeless fucking hole we call L.A. The only way to fix it is to flush it all away.
14
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prisonlaborharris
🌘💩 Post-Left 2
330d
learn to swim learn to swim learn to swim
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F8pnTQWzCHo&feature=youtu.be
hrs922
Left ⳩
330d
I mean, I dont necessarily belive BLM itself got hijacked by shitlibs, but in that clip they really didnt offer any evidence to why it wasnt other than then saying it wasnt.
I think a better answer is that it got hijacked by the systems it used to gain popularity, social media. In the social media world to gain to most support, one must say things that are highly emotional and aggravating. Saying something that baits your opponent into saying something even stupider is one of the best stratagies to gain traction. When success is based off of what gets the most traction off social media, the core of your movment is gonna get stuck in the same rhetoric and strategies in the real world
BLM can’t be “hijacked” by liberals to sow class division because it was created by liberals to sow class division.
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Dethrot666
George Carlinist
330d
It was always shitlibs is the point
Politically Houseless ⛺
330d
Isn't it true that (it seemed a reasonable explanation when I first heard it) that there are effectively two BLMs, the big national org with a new "race based" view of Marx, and countless grassroots local BLMs.
The big national one is the one with the page describing themselves as Anti-Racist, disruptors of the nuclear family that effectively has no use for black men unless they were murdered by police... While receiving a lot of money in donations. Meanwhile many of the countless local BLMs were products of their local area often doing great work in identifying specific problems with specific police forces. Local groups, like the one in Detroit where I had friends involved in, were happy to march with whites and focused on ending police violence for everyone.
I've heard a variation of this since the summer of 2020. I still don't know how true it is.
I think so, seeing it as a monolith is often used by their "right-wing" detractors. But viewing it as decentralized is probably the "true" BLM that most people who are concerned about the issue and got involved would have encountered.
I mean, I read the website and heard about the two ladies who founded it and got very rich. But I don't think that's a fair summation of the reality of BLM to 99% of people who got involved locally.
It's just too bad the national org took all the high-profile donation money from CEOs of large corporations so they could hang a tag on their webiste that reads "We Stand With Black Lives" or some shit.
wasn’t hijacked by liberals. liberals are already at the steering wheel of basically everything, they don’t need to hijack movements when they can just shoot them down instead. what really happened was that american socialists failed to hijack BLM and just surrendered to the various bourgeois positions denying the primacy of the class struggle, just like they always do
BassoeG
Progressive Liberal 🐕
330d
No shit Sherlock, insofar as it was already co-opted right from the start. "Donate to these grifters, burn down the homes and businesses of the poor and associate doing those two actions as the sole forms of leftist activism in existence, thereby discouraging people from joining/forming an actual leftism movement" does not pose a threat to the status quo.
e grassroots bits of BLM have been completely overshadowed by the corporate BLM, so my guess is the Dems will use it just like any other corporate sponsorships.
I fully expect BLM to come back full swing in the next election cycle.
permalinkredditreveddit
[−]InstupituousJay4 points11 months ago
That unfortunate part is that those very same grassroots organizations are the ones actually doing what needs to be done to fix their communities.
permalinkredditrevedditparent
[−]thebananakneel1 point10 months ago
There were no problems until ANTIFA and BLM showed up. The general population does not support disgruntled youth that want conflict because of their ideology. American youth bring nothing but violence and problems, not solutions that will be implemented through compromised consensus.
It was always shitlib.
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Richard-Cheese
Special Ed 😍
330d
Great article
9
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YoureWrongUPleb
"... and that's a good thing!"
330d
Reed rocks. If anyone reading this thread is new here take a look at his stuff on the sidebar
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BassoeG
Progressive Liberal 🐕
330d
https://nonsite.org/why-black-lives-matter-cant-be-co-opted/
No shit Sherlock, insofar as it was already co-opted right from the start. "Donate to these grifters, burn down the homes and businesses of the poor and associate doing those two actions as the sole forms of leftist activism in existence, thereby discouraging people from joining/forming an actual leftism movement" does not pose a threat to the status quo.
BLM will be back in time for the next presidential election. Totally by "coincidence" of course..
putrifiedcattle
@
330d
There were huge BLM marches in my city. Lots of energy. A few days into it, a 13-year-old autistic boy was shot ( https://youtu.be/GEfJrwHMTMY ) by our brave boys in blue. I immediately starting gearing up to go protest. I was checking all my social media for when the protest was going to start...and...nothing. I realized right then and there that the movement wasn't serious. Such a BLATANT example of police abuse, but it didn't fit a narrow race interpretation and was therefore ignored. They don't want to win as much as they want woke points.
It's myopically directed just towards black lives, as if being poor or suffering from mental illness doesn't also predispose one to abuse at the hands of police.
The warmongering segregationist who militarized the cops and sucked off a Klansmen at his funeral became President, but Biden has a (D) by his name, so that was all intentionally forgotten.
deleted]
330d
We did it! Trump lost!!
It spread a lot exactly 4 years prior. See if you can figure it out.
Happens every time there is large-scale BLM activity. In the Summer of 2020 the BLM movement subsided for a number of reasons:
-The election cycle and the late 2020 COVID surge captured the general public’s attention, resulting in reduced concentration of social justice matters.
-The election news cycle picking up coincided with a lack of new black men killed by police. What made the movement so noteworthy in the summer of 2020 was the habitual cycle of police being filmed killing unarmed citizens. While at first we hard the 10 minute long body cam footage of George Floyd, BLM organizers were able to sustain anger when more and more videos of other unarmed men being killed by police resurfaced. While there is no doubt the cops were still killing guys in late 2020, those killings (for whatever reason) were not as high profile as George Floyd and others, so the “movement” calmed their tits for awhile.
-Biden winning the election and January 6. Even though black people fare just a bad under Democrats as Republicans, the BLM movement was helped kept afloat by Trumps authoritarian response to the protests/riots. Once “the adults were back in the room” (💅🏼💅🏼💅🏼) and January 6 happened, the DNC found their new talking point, and because they didn’t want to ACTUALLY do anything about police brutality once they took over DC the forcefulness with which the BLM movement had earlier been wielded was subsided.
They were much less clear-cut than George Floyd and also at times misrepresented. 2 major cases after George Floyd was Rayshad Brooks and Jacob Blake. Rayshad Brooks resisted arrest and fought cops and fired a taser he stole back at them after drunk driving. Jacob Blake was blatant media astroturfing. The initial story was so severely off from the truth and presented him as some innocent bystander trying to break up a fight despite in reality he was trying to drive away in a car with a child belonging to his ex-girlfriend who had a restraining order on him for repeatedly assaulting her both physically and sexually. The final nail in the coffin was the knife girl. It was honestly astroturfed from the start. The Micheal Brown case was one of the first major BLM protests.
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EpicKiwi225
Politically Houseless ⛺
330d
The Jacob Blake one was the worst because the media told everyone he died and never really retracted it. He didn't die. He's alive right now, and I assume he's pissed because blm made bank off of him and didn't give him anything
Also why didn't anyone care about the lives of the child and the child's mother? They were fucking terrified of this dude, had a restraining order and called the cops. Their lives don't matter?
rolurk
Social Democrat 🌹
330d
Of course support for BLM has dried up. It served its purpose, a Democrat is in the White House and Chauvin was convicted.
The media no longer needs it and has discarded like an old toy.
Members of the BLM board cashed out with T.V. deals.
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RorschachsVoice
330d
It's not cool anymore, wait until the next thing they will create and everyone will prais 10
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Absolutely nothing, just like there was no impact to people supporting them in the first place.
The whole affair is a circus sideshow.
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CueBallJoe
🌘💩 🌗 Special Ed 😍 2
330d
...oooooof freaks here in this hopeless fucking hole we call L.A. The only way to fix it is to flush it all away.
15
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dems are naive republicans are ignorant
es even more from average people. Tankies have to learn that no, revolution isn’t coming soon in
peru marx consv pm
idpol reddit blmcrt
defend ali wokeness
jill stein not russian operative
left rifht agree they trump dems
wp ‘narrative’ trump article talk page
idpol intersectionspprt horseshoe effect
anti march life
away from xtian faith bad
state run media
antirase conscvpedia
captlst echmcs
sm harris sbnr more
who im like ie haz, jim wbb, ksinema, peru mlexninjst pj
derad bigger pic same spirit bgj bipoc views change within
(when a certain level of wealth is obtained in our country so that there is no reason for a country not to create such a system, why should people have to pay if they are sick or need medical help?)
. They say, “Hey what about the kids in cages, the endless wars, and Medicare for All?” They use this crit
pc page other planets confed things
I just want to say that it absolutely disgusts me that tankies are more sympathetic towards the Capitol rioters, literal fascists, than AOC. I'll say it here, I'm really happy that Big Tech censored fascists. Fascists not getting free speech is good, as they want to shut down everyone's free speech.
consol list for lib 20 things including backfire
Whites infiltrate , deny whiteness
Whites bad mouth multiculturalism and migrants
Whites create conflicts
Whites create revolutions
Whites cry loudly because of "persecution", whine, blackmail using international "justice"
Create revolutions, terror systems, "Bolshevism", mass murderer, mass rubbing-out, "inflation", etc...
blog goals
break free holiday nonsense
other planets right wing
fave pol
other planet send unpc things
misc
have to admit ifurther left than
multipolar para left
bolshvk a torba off grid expand rusia lgbtq
diversity fun white boring whute ethno swiych places blcks whtes
juche other planets
same ox all op just caz dint agree does not make it not left crnege left russa mrrge max b caleb m,
pluralisms and article
Dugin actively advocates for the creation of a Eurasian superstate to combat America in a war he refers to in his works as the “Endkampf,” so I wouldn’t call him antiwar.
Left Warmongering? Just because people in the Pentagon have adopted “woke” ideas doesn’t make them legitimately left wing, it’s just intersectional imperialism (it amazes me conservatives are able to fall for that).
Dugin has flip flopped on fascism, but in the past he’s argued that fascism had the right ideas but “wrong execution” (his social views are even more inconsistent).
reactionary brought back when they dusted off Marx but no longer fit due to conservatism filling that role since reactionary was in vogue (al qaed to extreme to slap reactionary label on) this allows them to use reactionary label liberally since it is thus not easily defined
progress changing not corps they are patsies
k marx grouch etc
tankie
left lib bbc anti g reset
next blog yellow soca
Defusing virulent anti-statism will require a prolonged struggle for hearts and minds. At a minimum, it will demand the sort of sustained attention, resources, introspection, community-building, and legislative action, that the U.S. policy community has never excelled at producing. It will almost certainly mean rethinking the way we produce and consume media, revising our laws surrounding hate speech, and reviewing the actions and policies of the police and military. And, distasteful though it might seem right now, it will also mean finding a way to ensure that those who harbor anti-statist sentiments but reject violence still have a voice in the legitimate political process, subject to public scrutiny.
cultural imperialism https://open.lib.umn.edu/mediaandculture/chapter/13-7-cultural-imperialism/ That Slate columnist David Auerbach did nothing wrong by sharing tips about Wikipedia controversies with another reporter etc Media/News events
The national MSM is wrong for covering kidnapping/missing person stories (like Natalee Holloway , Gabby Petito, Travis Alexander, Lacey Peterson or Caylee Anthony) . Those types of stories shouldn’t be national stories, let alone international stories. They also don’t deserve to trend on social media
Those types of stories shouldn’t be on CNN or Fox News or ANY national news stations. Those type of news stories shouldn’t be in newspapers across the country let alone world.
The MSM is wrong for covering stories like the Chile miner rescue story or the Thai rescue story. Cave rescue stories in Chile or Thailand should not be on CNN or Fox News. They should not be in newspapers across the US (or at worst those types of cave rescue stories shouldn’t have anything more than a trivial mention of them)
Even stories like the Swedish beer truck road rage incident shouldn’t have been covered in the US. There are far worse car incidents each day in the US and they don’t get that coverage.
There is no reason that millions of Americans should know about those stories or waste one second of their lives thinking about those stories. Americans and internationalists should worry about their own lives instead of meaningless media circuses that have no bearing effect on their lives
When the MSM covers the above types of stories it deludes the seriousness of true big stories
I want to force the US media to stop covering kidnapping/missing person stories .
I want to force the national US media to stop covering cave rescue types of stories like the Chile miner rescue story Swedish beer truck road rage incident or the Thai rescue story. (or at worst those force them not to cover those types of cave rescue stories more than trivially)
Even some mass shootings and terror attacks, while unlike the stories above should get at least some national coverage for at least a few days (give or take/ymmv), but even those types of stories get covered way too much to the point that it is shoved down our throats, and through that over coverage, traumatizes people (or instills terror in them) and even inspires copy cat killers (knowing that if they do a mass shooting they will be famous and in newspapers and on CNN etc and put fear or terror into people)
It's like news stations and agencies profit over the pain and suffering of other people (like I mentioned above)
People who rubberneck off those stories are also wrong for taking part in their suffering by them further exploiting their pain and suffering
It’s almost like death worship.
When the news media and corporations shove terror attacks down our throats (and force those terrorism stories to have a significant impact on society), they are spreading terror, and doing the job of the terrorists for them
24 hours news, their viewers (ie social media), internet etc fan the above pain and further political divide that come out of those tragedies. see CNN effect for more
Network is a great satire of the issues with our media today with its relevant point that it makes about corporate run, sensationalist media and their impact on society which still holds true.today, if not more so.
Words are like weapons, satellites of news stations etc are like the new artillery. News today like Fox News, MSNBC, CNN and TV political pundits increasingly polarize us with their news judgements (which includes fake news and disinformation) . This includes electronic warfare in the same vain. Our media who influences us in politics is owned by large congolomerates who seek to profit over dividing us. Tomorrow Never Dies makes a good point about this (along with China's wolf warrior diplomacy with Western companies)
Leisure
A lot of things people think they do on their own accord are really stuff that people are brainwashed to do by corporations, media, government. To break free of that bondage, people should follow my advice below.
People are brainwashed to wear the same types of tennis shoes (Nike) ,to wear the same types of clothes, to use the same social media sites (Instagram, Tiktok, Reddit), to celebrate holidays (Mother's Day, Father's Day, Helloween, Valenswines Day, spring break), politics (to be anti gun, pro weed,postmodern, etc) to follow stupid trends (like the ALS ice sucket challenge) to basically to look, act and think the same etc.
When so many people do so many of some of the same things above, that is proof that people are being brainwashed to do them. If people knew they were brainwashed, they wouldn't be brainwashed.
It's time people become different and try to find ways to do the least amount of things that 'other' people do. It feels better to NOT do popular things than to do them.
All of the above brainwashing to force conformity runs counter to Individualism. Individualism is a basic human right and human value and needs to be exercised to stop this brainwashing conformity by the overlords. Individualism is human right and the stuff above flies in the face of that and tries to strip people of their Individualism
Corporations and the like from America-Canada and to an extent Western Europe has spread their brainwashing abroad via WESTERN CULTURAL IMPERIALISM and GLOBALIZATION. From Nike to certain holidays, to social media like Tiktok and Instagram, to Hollywood, to Western (mostly AMERICAN or CANADIAN) music, etc the whole world seems to be a clone of America-Canadian (and to a lesser extent Western European) culture wise.
There is no more cultural uniqueness, due to this violation of those culture via WESTERN CULTURAL IMPERIALISM and Globalization. When you see Youtubers in Iran, Iceland and Australia dressing and acting like Youtubers from California, we have a major problem that needs a solution.
The corporate west and particular Corporate America uses this WESTERN CULTURAL IMPERIALISM and Globalization to 'civilize' and to exploit people, which these demented fascists have been doing for too long. Remember the quote? “No country with a McDonald’s would start an unprovoked war with another country”.
https://theappalachianonline.com/opinion-big-business-is-killing-cultures/ cultural imperialism https://open.lib.umn.edu/mediaandculture/chapter/13-7-cultural-imperialism/
We have to stop this Western CULTURAL IMPERIALISM and Globalization
Individualism is human right and the stuff aboe flies in the face of that and tries to strip people of their Individualism
SM
This echos my thoughts on social media: https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/comments/8cf6k5/cmv_social_media_is_the_worst_thing_to_happen_to/
Seeing teens and 20 somethings on Youtube today doing their senseless videos makes me depressed about the future of this world. It's like they are robots being brainwashed and controlled by corporations, not people with Christ in their heart or Individualism.
I am not a party person (haven't been to one since the 2000s). I do go to in person block get togethers our housing community has each year, as I did in the spring of 2019, February 2020, spring of 2021 etc
I've been like that since I was a teen since I like having peace, and having my personal space.
Most to the vast majority of Americans only go to the types of in person parties that would have been approved in mid 2020 in California and Australia during the lockdowns and or to parties that I wouldn't really consider true parties since most Americans are too busy to either go to parties in person or too busy to go to 'real parties' in person. Parties are dumb, childish, immature and haven for drunks.
I also want to prevent people from going to all night parties forever. That is one of my goals. There is no logical reason for someone to go to an all night party. All night parties cause health issues like diseases, sexual abuse etc. All night parties are against the values of our world and I plan to force every place on Earth to permanently ban all night parties forever
In most alternate realities, there was as little in person parties in the US, Australia, Canada , Europe, Asia in 2022, 2023, 2024 etc as there was in early mid to mid 2020 in the US or China in our reality
Virtual parties are better than in person parties and with the Web 3.0 or Web 4.0 they will slowly phase out in person parties or change in person parties to be less partyish.
I don't like theme parks and I will never go to one as a tourist ever. I only will work at them and only as a UN volunteer , CDC volunteer or WHO volunteer in order to prevent people from getting injured by poorly built rides or sick from rides since those type of things
People are brainwashed to go theme parks, just like they are brainwashed to celebrate holidays, to wear Nike, to have Facebooks (or to use Facebook so much. The way Facebook censors everything and is bias via government interference is proof it is wrong), to have the same types of clothes ,same types of cars etc.
Ever since I watched Jurassic World in the late 2010s and saw tourists in those lines in the movie waiting for and going on a stupid dinosaur ride (where they looked like the wives in Stepford Wives, only here it was tourists waiting in a line for a ride), I've been generally anti theme park.
Theme parks are a waste of time, childish and is time that can better spent reading a novel. The only theme parks that are good are health related ones or ones where only a limited amount of people can go to at a time (Disney's Night Kingdom, Discovery Cove).
Theme parks also are bad because they are built in a way that people invade other peoples’ personal spaces and that is wrong. Theme parks are germ magnets, and people on lines in theme parks suffer breathing problems due to ride lines being so packed.
The vast majority of Americans, Canadians and Europeans who have been to theme parks in person since 2020 and will go to theme parks in person in the future, only go to the types of theme parks in person that they would have been allowed to go to in person in early mid 2020 or mid 2020 (even if they were California ,Michigan or Australia residents at the time) if they really pushed hard enough back then despite the lockdowns (since those lockdown rules were never set in stone) or go to theme parks that have capacity limits like Discovery Cove and Night Kingdom
The vast majority of Russians, Middle East residents, Africa residents, South Americans and Asians never go to theme parks ever .At least 30 percent of Americans don’t go to theme parks ever
In most alternate realities, there are as a little amount of theme parks open in the 2020s ,2030s, 2040s as there was in our reality in early mid 2020, mid 2020, late 2020 etc.
There should never be any in person concerts or sporting events in the future where people at the concert are less than 6 feet apart.
I do make exceptions for in person concerts that raise money for charity like hurricanes, LGBTQ+ causes, diseases, social justice reasons (ie to combat domestic violence or sex trafficking) but that is it.
Crowd surfing should be banned forever as that is abuse and disgusting. Crowd surfing is a violation of a person’s personal space and it spreads germs and disease.
In person concerts destroy peoples' ears and people being so close together at concerts violates their person space and causes breathing problems. In person concerts spread disease etc
If in person concerts where people are packed together was so important, they wouldn't have been banned in 2020. It's that simple. Virtual concerts are the future, so there is really no need to go to in person concerts. I feel the same way about sporting events and similar activities
In many alternate realities, in person concerts are as non existent in the US in 2022, 2023, 2024 etc as they were non existent in our reality in the spring and summer 2020
I a specific type of anti leisure tourism activist (somewhat like the anti tourist activists in Spain).
I believe people should only travel more than 750 miles from their home if it is for medical reasons, to move somewhere, to go to college somewhere, to do military things somewhere, to do mission, aide or charity work somewhere, to go somewhere they would have been allowed to travel to in mid 2020, to go somewhere for political reasons or similar excuses. The vast vast majority of Americans, Canadians, Europeans , Asians, Australians etc who travel far this decade etc would fall into at least one of the above categories
Outside of those exceptions I am anti tourism (except when I briefly oscillate semi subconsciously to being the opposite in somewhat rare times). Tourism is bad because it causes climate change, it ruins local cultures, it is something people are brainwashed to do and other reasons.
66 percent of Americans have never left North America, 72 percent of Americans have never been to Europe (ditto for the other way around), 88 percent of Americans have never been to Oceania or Asia. Over 15 percent of Americans have never left their home state, 26 percent of Americans have never or barely left their region of the country etc.
In most alternate realities, Americans, Canadians, Europeans etc travel as little in the 2010s, 2020s, 2030s etc as they traveled little in our reality in the 19th century
Clothing
I am against people wear high top sneakers and mid top sneakers (though if they are brainwashed to keep wearing high top sneakers, the the only type of high top sneakers I am ok with people wearing is Chuck Taylor high tops and Converses high tops).
There is no need to wear high top sneakers or mid top sneakers ever.
Regular sneakers, hiking boots, etc are more than enough to cover for that. High top sneakers and mid top sneakers are unneeded, ugly and trashy. They destroy peoples feet. I have never worn high top sneakers or mid top sneakers ever and I will never wear high top sneakers or mid top sneakers ever
Over 60 percent of Americans have never worn high top sneakers or mid top sneakers ever or if they did the only types of high top sneakers they wore were Chuck Taylor-Converse high top sneakers. No place on Earth requires people to wear high top sneakers or mid top sneakers.
I am against people wearing Nike brand of sneakers.
Not because of politics or labor practice, strictly because Nike literally brainwashes people to wear their product. It's a fact, because there is no way that so many people can wear Nike brand of sneakers without it being because brainwashing. Hundreds of millions or a few billion people should NOT wear the same brand of sneakers. People in far away lands such as Iran, Australia, Russia, Paraguay shouldn’t wear Nike or at worst, Nike shouldn’t be anywhere near as big as they are in those countries as they are now
Nike uses their logo to brainwash people. They are a evil, aggressive monopolistic corporation who should be shut down forever . They are a symbol of corporate greed just like Big Tech and Disney and that needs to end forever
I have never worn Nike sneakers ever and I will never wear Nike sneakers ever, under any circumstances. There is no place on Earth that requires people to wear Nike sneakers. There are enough brand of sneakers to choose from. People who wear Nike sneakers are cultists.
About 20 percent of Americans have never worn Nike sneakers, and over 37 something percent of Europeans have never worn Nike sneakers. Over 5 billion people on Earth have never worn Nike sneakers
I don’t even wear sneakers ever (not since the early 2010s). I will never wear them again. No company or government can force me to wear sneakers ever. My Body my CHOICE (FREEDOM, LIBERTY ETC)
I wear keen shoes with socks, clarks shoes, boots, hiking boots and enclosed sandals with socks only.
I am a fan of Victorian era dress for men and women. Back then men and women dressed classy and respectively, they didn't wear over the top or unclassy and exploitative clothing like modern men’s swimwear, bikinis (bikinis objectify women which is wrong and sexist. Bikinis put focus on the outward appearance of women instead of their inward qualities which is wrong and sexist), sneakers, baggy pants etc.
Since I am a fan of that era of clothing, I think it would be cool if men and women wore the same clothes on the beaches and in the oceans that men and women wore on the beaches and in the oceans during the Victorian era (in particular the 1890s and 1900s decade). Which means no sneakers ever, no exploitative swimwear (like bikinis or modern men’s swimwear) , no baggy pants ever etc
I don't like men wearing short shorts or wife beater shirts. Men should also wear longer shorts in the ocean. I am against men wearing speedos of thongs in public
If I was a woman, I would say that I don't care for fellow women wearing bikinis (especially 1 or 2 piece bikinis) and I am not a radical cheerleader for fellow women wearing bathing suits that don't have shorts.
I'd further say that I'd much prefer fellow women wear short shorts with their bathing suits when they go into the ocean, laying on a beach, going in a pool, than what they currently wear. Bikinis objectify women which wrong and sexist. Bikinis put focus on the outward appearance of women instead of their inward beauties which is wrong and sexist.
Women shouldn't be required by their jobs or by formal establishments or award shows or anywhere to wear high heels ever. That goes against individualism and the freedom of expression.
High heels are bad for women to wear because they put focus on the women's beauty, femininity and sexual outward qualities, instead of focusing on women's strength, creative, intelligence and other inward qualities. High heels basically objectifies women and they also cause feet issues for women.
The only types of high heels that I am not against women wearing are bandage heels, enclosed heels, wedged heels, low heels, high healed boots, any types of high heels with socks, Journee Collection Wendy 09 pumps, strapped heels, wedged sneaker high heels, type of heel that Tina wore in The Deep End 2010. I am against women wearing any other types of high heels or pumps except the ones I wrote above.
I am against people going barefoot in public places (i.e malls, stores, theme parks, etc). Going barefoot in public places causes disease and infection and people should be turned away or kicked out of malls, stores, theme parks etc if they go barefoot inside of those places. Plus it is primitive to go barefoot in public and offends people. If you ever see anyone barefoot in public, get security to throw their them out.
Though I am very wary of and or pessimistically appraise democracy) nrx and the quantitative illusion. I feel that democracy restricts accountability and freedom (nick land nrx
writes concerning the words integration and desegregation:
In recent years many historians have come to distinguish between these like-sounding words... The movement toward desegregation, breaking down the nation's Jim Crow system, became increasingly popular in the decade after World War II. Integration, on the other hand, Professor Oscar Handlin maintains, implies several things not yet necessarily accepted in all areas of American society. In one sense it refers to the "levelling of all barriers to association other than those based on ability, taste, and personal preference";[1] in other words, providing equal opportunity. But in another sense integration calls for the random distribution of a minority throughout society. Here, according to Handlin, the emphasis
1]
White and black postal clerks sorting mail together, USA, 1890
Similarly, Keith M. Woods writes on the need for precision in journalistic language: "Integration happens when a monolith is changed, like when a black family moves into an all-white neighborhood. Integration happens even without a mandate from the law. Desegregation," on the other hand, "was the legal remedy to segregation."[2] In 1997, Henry Organ, who identified himself as "a participant in the Civil Rights Movement on the (San Francisco) Peninsula in the '60s ... and ... an African American," wrote that the "term 'desegregation' is normally reserved to the legal/legislative domain, and it was the legalization of discrimination in public institutions based on race that many fought against in the 1960s. The term 'integration,' on the other hand, pertains to a social domain; it does and should refer to individuals of different background who opt to interact."[3]
In their book By the Color of Our Skin (1999) Leonard Steinhorn and Barbara Diggs-Brown also make a similar distinction between desegregation and integration. They write "... television has ... give[n] white Americans the sensation of having meaningful, repeated contact with blacks without actually having it. We call this phenomenon virtual integration, and it is the primary reason why the integration illusion – the belief that we are moving toward a colorblind nation – has such a powerful influence on race relations in America today." Reviewing this book in the libertarian magazine Reason, Michael W. Lynch sums up some of their conclusions as "Blacks and whites live, learn, work, pray, play, and entertain separately..." Then, he writes:
The problem, as I see it, is that access to the public spheres, specifically the commercial sphere, often depends on being comfortable with the norms of white society. If a significant number of black children aren't comfortable with them, it isn't by choice: It's because they were isolated from those norms. It's one thing for members of the black elite and upper middle class to choose to retire to predominantly black neighborhoods after a lucrative day's work in white America. It's quite another for people to be unable to enter that commercial sphere because they spent their formative years in a community that didn't, or couldn't, prepare them for it. Writes [Harvard University sociologist Orlando] Patterson, "The greatest problem now facing African-Americans is their isolation from the tacit norms of the dominant culture, and this is true of all classes."[4]
xample, the Achaemenid Empire, which was founded by Cyrus the Great, successfully followed a policy of incorporating and tolerating various cultures.[2]
Distinction from multiculturalism[edit]
Cultural pluralism is distinct from multiculturalism, which lacks the requirement of a dominant culture. If the dominant culture is weakened, societies can easily pass from cultural pluralism into multiculturalism without any intentional steps being taken by that society. If communities function separately from each other, or compete with one another, they are not considered culturally pluralistic.[3]
In 1971, the Canadian government referred to cultural pluralism, as opposed to multiculturalism, as the "very essence" of the nation's identity.[4] Cultural pluralism can be practiced at varying degrees by a group or an individual.[5] A prominent example of pluralism is the United States, in which a dominant culture with strong elements of nationalism, a sporting culture, and an artistic culture contained also smaller groups with their own ethnic, religious, and cultural norms.[citation needed]
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