(So good it's worth it's own thread) Call it “tribalism” if you want. But another explanation is that one political party turned full-on fascist and the rest of us found that unacceptable. If You Want To Be Friends, Then Why Aren’t You Friendly? (substack.com) Travis Ikeguchi, 27-year old superfan of supremacist right-wing media propaganda, murdered Laura Ann Carleton, 66-year old fan of human beings in all their wonderful variety. Perhaps you heard about this on the news. Ikeguchi argued with her before he shot her, because she had a pride flag on display outside her establishment. A pride flag is a way of telling the world that gay and trans and nonbinary people matter just as much as other people, which is something that a lot of people believe. I have one up in the front of my house, for example. If you look at Ikeguchi’s Twitter page, which I do not recommend, you’ll see that his pinned tweet approvingly suggests that the correct thing to do with such a flag, which represents queer people, is to burn it. And as I said, Ikeguchi was a fan of right-wing media, like for instance Matt Walsh, the sweaty-minded christian fascist propagandist who recently proclaimed, while explaining how the existence of trans people brings him into “a boiling rage” that he would rather be dead than have his children be trans, so you can imagine how he feels about other people and their trans children. This means that Laura Ann Carleton’s store is a potentially safer place for Matt Walsh’s children than Matt Walsh’s house, especially if we ponder what christian fascist men who have decided they would rather be dead tend to do to their family members on the way out—especially loved ones who have become the targets of, and excuses they give themselves for, their boiling rage. It also indicates that if the time comes that Matt Walsh might be in danger of wishing his children and/or himself dead, Matt Walsh’s children will know they have safer places to which to go. That’s one thing the pride flag means for queer people, and that notion of safety for others is what makes people like her so dangerous to Matt Walsh—who like hundreds of other fascist propagandists broadcasts to his audience of thousands or millions his hatred about the people that flag represents. And yes, Travis Ikeguchi just so happened to be one of those thousands or millions in Walsh’s audience, and he didn’t like the message of safety and inclusion conveyed by Laura Ann Carleton’s pride flag either, so he shot her, because he thought that was his right, which is something that powerful people have spent their careers ensuring would be very easy for him to think and then do. This is because those powerful people insist that guns are an essential component for freedom, and make sure that there is at all times as little legal friction as possible between guns and boiling rage. The argument goes thus: if somebody is impinging your freedom or threatening you, then you might need to kill them, and guns are the best way to do that. And these same powerful people have spent their careers telling anyone who will listen that gay people are an impingement on their freedom, and a threat to society in general, and a lot of people have listened to this over the years, and many of them have connected those rather proximal dots—including, it seems, Travis Ikeguchi, 27. ------------------------ It's unfair to excerpt this, every paragraph is on point and needs to be widely read, but... ----------------------- There are a lot of people who are less murderous, but still think that gay people and their allies should not be around, and will tell you so. What’s interesting is that most of them will probably also tell you they agree that Laura Ann Carleton should not have been murdered, because they think of themselves as good people, and good people do not think that other people should be murdered, by and large, so they do not usually approve of murder—unless, that is, the propagandists tell them that it was one of the good murders, which is something I believe the Germans call a rittenhaus. However, these good people also will not stop thinking that queer people should not be around in the world, nor will they stop delivering messages that make the abuse and harm of queer people rather inevitable, or stop delivering power to people who will help make sure that gay people aren’t around. And there are a lot of other people who think it’s it’s fine either way if gay people are or are not around, but also when it is time to deliver power, they choose to deliver power to those people who think that gay people should not be around. They just have some other reason to deliver power to those people. These are their political views. I’m thinking today about political views because there was a tweet going around the same time as Laura Ann Carleton was murdered for being a friend to queer people, that began thusly: Leftists can’t understand being friends with people who don’t share their political views, but for most people it's just the norm. The idea of the tweet being that a normal thing that normal people do is to not let political views harm the comity of existing relationships, or to affect starting new ones—and that a group called “leftists” apparently cannot comprehend this extremely normal posture. A few days before the tweet, professional mourner of crumbling civility and amateur shoe filler David Brooks published a piece mourning, hold onto your hats, the crumbling of civility. Civility was apparently robust back in David Brooks’ childhood, back when Jim Crow laws were in place and enforced by a regime of vigilante/police terror known as lynching, and gayness was criminalized and prosecuted, and women couldn’t have their own bank accounts without their husband’s permissions, and so forth. These days, however, the channels that carry American abuse have apparently been dug closer to David Brooks’ house than they were in those more lovely days, so civility is nearly completely disappeared, at least according to David Brooks, now that the screams of marginalized people have finally grown loud enough for him to hear from his porch. It’s a very common lament: that there is no civility left these days, as compared to earlier days, and the main reason appears to be that those on the “left” refuse to be friends with those on the “right,” shunning them simply because of their political views. This implies something rather startling: American conservatives want to be friends with the rest of us. Had you realized? You’d never know it to listen to them, but apparently it is so, and the notion that some of us don’t want to be friends with them is one of the most pressing matters to be found in the opinion sections of our nation’s great newspapers and magazines and newsfortainment television programs. I’m not even linking to the tweet or the article. If you missed them, more will come by soon enough, as regular as waves, as regular as clouds, as regular as hate crimes, as regular as racist gerrymanders, as regular as library closings, as regular as book bans and anti-trans legislation, as regular as gun murders in the United States of America. So now I’d like to pick apart this strange idea, that the great problem before is incivility and polarization, caused most specifically because those of us on the left won’t be friends with those on the right, over nothing more than their political views. Let’s look at the key terms, which are “left and right,” and “political views,” and “friends.” “Left and right” I don’t really know any more about “the left” and “the right.” I’m not trying to be coy; I know what’s meant, and I frequently employ those terms as they’re meant, but I see their descriptive limitations, which make them feel a bit threadbare. I know a bit more about something that I call spirit, which I merely use to mean the way that collective human belief creates effects in the world, creates what is possible and not possible—creates, in other words, the endlessly mutable form of reality that we might refer to as “the way the world is.” I know about an emerging spirit that believes that everyone deserves access to basic human needs—which includes space to live safely as who they know themselves to be—simply because of the fact of their humanity, without a thought to how that life should be deserved or earned, a spirit that sees humans as a value rather than a cost. And I know about a dominant empowered spirit that believes that only some deserve life, as mediated through its adherents’ own specific ideas of how people ought to be permitted to exist, and its adherents’ beliefs that they are the ones who get to issue the license of whether or not a person deserves to live, and that they are entitled to punish and abuse, harm and exclude, exploit and kill, those to whom they choose not to issue license. It strikes me the more accurate labels for these spirits than left and right would be humanist and supremacist. If I wanted to give these spirits labels, I suppose that “the left” and “the right” and their attendant political parties make for a marginally useful shorthand. While it’s true that a supremacist spirit can be found in every state in our nation, and within both of our major ideologies and political parties, it’s not difficult to see which of these parties is pursuing the supremacist spirit energetically, ruthlessly, and relentlessly. To see the supremacist spirit in motion in the United States, one has only to look around at what happens where the Republican Party is thriving most. --------------- Read it all.
Yeah, I've been turning my gears on the whole "left wing" "right wing" thing for awhile. Haven't known how to frame it without getting instant blubbering from the FFs of the world. Wings make it sound like it's a plane, and that you need both wings to fly. What do we need fascism for exactly? It's not a wing, it wants to eat the fucking plane. Like the gremlin in Twilight Zone.
A wing is also part of a building. West Wing, for example. So our political edifice has wings . . . left, right, libertarian, fascist, communist, whatever your preferred terms.
Yes. I believe it goes back to the French Revolution. In the legislative chamber the more conservatives sat to the right side of the chamber with the moderates in the middle and then more liberal to the left.
I have this running disagreement with kicking out the bigots or openly demonizing them IRL groups, and just letting it slide because it has become so stealth and hidden in the mix, but it festers. It is like bacteria. You don't see it, and it is a PITA worrying about the small amounts of it that might be around. I thought you could rely on the naturasl immune system of people to get rid of it. You get used to it being around and it festers until the bacteria can get out of control because something else effects the societal organism. For instance we always had this undercurrent of right wing shock jocks, neo nazi organizations, and souther rebel propagands which was really Anti-black american heritage. I look at people like my grandparents as being fully infected with racism, but only the family saw it. One of my grandmothers was a loved schoolteacher, and the couple of black kids she had thought she was great. They never knew what she said about the others. She always thought black kids were stupider than white kids, but she always behaved and made them feel happy as kids. She voted for the racist policies and tough on crime stuff because she wanted the police to be the ones throwing them in jail. She liked that be tough on the black kids cop. She knew every crime I did and every failing I had and I was still her favorite kid because my sister was born with a vagina. These things fester in invisible pockets that are only seen through microscopic examination. I bet you could see my grandmother grading the black kids worse than the white kids, but you would have had to really look at the small things. Her effects on the community were stealth in that she supported prejudiced police and government. The woman would never use the N-word or even have a confederate flag. He dog whistle flag was the red white and blue american flag because that proud white america always stood for white america. There were no other national flags around my grandparents. That american flag stood for good old american white power. To get that level of racism out takes time for liberal educational cleaners to work. It does work. However, at some point you need to get some real heavy disinfectant to kill of the stealth bacterial racism in the cellular structure of society. You need an antibiotic, because you cannot go burning everything out of society that looks like it is racist without tearing society apart. That anti-biotic anti racism works on the social level and not the criminal level. It does work. Just the other night we took my nephew out for his birthday and his current GF was there and she is black. The person he dated earlier this year was trans. No one is giving him any real compliments or saying way to be woke. We don't have time, he is a teenager and seems to be doing well in the social arena. We never cancelled the grandparents for being their racist selves, but it was known that it was a negative trait and he was better off without it. That does come from calling out the problems with racism and other prejudice on a social level.
Read this earlier yesterday. Almost nothing new under the sun, except this: This is interesting, and could maybe stand some further analysis and maybe study. The rest is a bunch of holier-than-thou sanewashing of the far left, as if communism as actually practiced was actually humanistic and not just as focused on supremacy as the far right. No, we don’t have a communist problem today, but it’s idiotic to say or imply that the extreme left would build us a humanistic utopia when we saw 70+ years of them doing very much not that.
I'm playing through SWTOR again as a light-sided Sith Warrior and this comes up a lot - the idea that the Sith constantly offers a chance to peaceably retreat but the Jedi/Republic folks always attack because "he's a Sith!!". And they're made out to be in the wrong for it... Only they really aren't, because you CAN find some decent Imperials and Sith, but they're like 1% of the population. It WOULD strike a chord with the "Should you always punch a Nazi?" part of me, but the game has it that you think you can change Sith society from within. And that's the fucking SITH. I mean, there might be some decent folk in the Republican party or the UK Conservatives. But at some point, you've got to take a long hard fucking look at the side you're on and say... yeah, I'm gonna go form my own group with the folk who AREN'T fucking evil.
There's no practical point in contrasting actual goddamned Nazis infesting the political right with theoretical potential communists who've never had a microscopic gram of political influence in this country. Is it hypothetically possible for a leftest to get extreme enough to be a physical violent danger in the United States at some point decades from now? I suppose. Is there ANYTHING going on on the left - including so-called "antifa" that is remotely comparable to not just the reactionary fringe but the mainstream political project on the right in our current hour? Nope. Hell, dudes out here running for president can't ratchet up their nutsack high enough to say ""actual Nazis shooting black people in broad daylight is a bad thing" without trying to say "yes but media/trans/college professors/woke..." in the same breath.
