How come the left-wing talking points of the past are the right-wing talking points of today?

[Iconoclast]

Describe the type of person who holds the following views:

• There’s too much censorship from moral authoritarians.
• Globalism disenfranchises people and leads to abuses of labor rights.
• We ought to put an end to stifling bureaucratic institutions that threaten our way of life.
• The banker cartels control everything, and foreign debt enriches shady special interests.
• Our media is 24/7 corporate propaganda spew.
• We need more unionism to protect our high-paying skilled labor jobs.
• The perpetual security state makes the underclass fight their stupid petrodollar wars for them.

What sort of person does this sound like? Well, if you believe our media, you're looking at a radical-right, toothless, low-IQ, Antisemitic white trash trailer park denizen who's into protectionism and hates the global poor.



You wanna know something? If you said any of these things in the late 90s or early 00s, chances are, you were a left-winger of some stripe.



The moral authoritarians were little old Republican grandmas with blue rinses.

The opposition to globalism and foreign debt was because of sweatshops and structural adjustment programs that enabled wealthy nations to prey on the poor.

The opposition to bureaucracy was because it was viewed as destructive to life and liberty; inhuman and robotic, opposed to all of our creative energies.

Corporate propaganda was taken as a fact of life, to the point where Noam Chomsky wrote at length on the topic.

People wanted unionism and higher wages to protect the underclass from corporate exploitation.

Anti-interventionism was aimed at protecting civilians in other countries from becoming victims of imperialist aggression.

In twenty years, I have watched, with shock and dismay, as this entire narrative has been flipped completely on its head.

Now, the moral authoritarians are Social Justice Warriors concerned about representation in fiction, and if you criticize them for any reason, that means you're literally Satan and Hitler in the same body.

The opposition to globalism and foreign debt is allegedly because people think it's all some Zionist plot.

People dislike bureaucracy because they don't understand why bureaucracy is good for them because they're too uneducated to understand what bureaucracy is and what makes it special and above criticism for plebs.

If you disagree with the mainstream media, you're an extremist and a nationalist thug.

Unionism means you're a xenophobe and don't want Asians to have jobs.

Anti-interventionism means you're selfish and isolationist and want the treasure spent on those wars to stay in the West's coffers.

I can't help but sit back and think, gee, this state of affairs sure is convenient for the people in power.

For one thing, nothing has fundamentally changed in America's foreign or domestic policy in sixty years, and for another, the powers-that-be have successfully discredited all of their opponents.

So, what the hell happened? How did public perceptions flip-flop so completely in two decades while nothing fundamentally changed about our nation's policies?

 

[Deleted member 88]

Its best to understand the left today as a very fractured entity.

The WSWS or other marginal Marxist sects have somewhat similar views to what you say-though they see globalization as good(basically the economy in their view has outstripped the nation state(which needs to die for progress)-but current globalization is a capitalist order) whereas others oppose globalization all together-that's more your Center for Globalization, where the whole project is seen as an imperialist or Westernization enterprise.

• The banker cartels control everything, and foreign debt enriches shady special interests.
• Our media is 24/7 corporate propaganda spew.

Your far left still backs this, alongside the power of the working class(i.e unionism).

The academic left or what you might call the hegemonic left is what you hear as the "cultural Marxists". But this is a misnomer(though the identification with the Frankfurt school is more true). This New Left is extremely fragmented-and is focused entirely on matters of identity and subjective systems or notions of oppression and injustice.

Race, gender, sexuality, whiteness studies, critical theory, etc...

This New Left and the Former(your remaining orthodox Marxists) DO NOT LIKE EACH OTHER.

This New Left is contemptuous of the working class, and generally uninterested in even criticizing American imperialism(they do, but more as a pro forma action-American imperialism is bad because it perpetuates this or that subjective oppression). They don't actually have a program for social change beyond guilt tripping, creating strife, and tearing down things they view as bad(i.e. western civilization).

The above should entirely be contrasted with liberals-who generally accept the current order. They may accept various notions of "oppression" sincerely or rhetorically-this is your Guardian and NYT editorialists. They accept the current order as a given, and often have privileged positions within it. Its just they are in favor of LGBT rights or trans acceptance. And maybe regulating business more.

It is important to understand the "Left" today is a very broad entity.

 

[Scottty]

In the modern world, trying to shoehorn everyone into two simplistic boxes of "Left" and "Right" simply causes confusion.
The very meanings of those terms have changed over time.

Originally, the "Right" were the people who supported the French monarchy, and everyone who didn't was "Left".
Now, it's more like the "Left" means Communism, and everyone who opposes that is "Right".

 

[Doomsought]

Because left just means new while right means old.

The Left VS. Right Dicotomy was also created by the French, during the French Revolution. Like every other French idea of that time that didn't come from Napoleon, it was a terrible idea that made the world a worse place forever.

 

[Senor Hortler]

Left and right are a false difference that only works because of the defacto two party system in America and the UK. The UK right or 'conservative party' spouts talking points from the left now because they pretty much are the left from years ago. They are socially liberal but economically conservative. The conservatives allowed gay marriage and mass migration for fucks sakes. They conserve nothing.

 

[Marduk]

Describe the type of person who holds the following views:

Allow me to go point by point on that.

• There’s too much censorship from moral authoritarians.

Moral authoritarianism is the norm among ideologies, world and history. Only few significant political factions don't do it (much)- chiefly among them the classical liberal and libertarian movements of the west. Those who do it obviously do it in the direction of their own morals, which can sometimes lead to such moral authoritarianism not being identified to people who focus their vision on what they usually see as such - most common case of this being western people obsessed about fighting Christianity focused moral authoritarianism not recognizing the skyrocketing in influence of the progressive leftist one.

• Globalism disenfranchises people and leads to abuses of labor rights.

The less capitalist internationalists (trotskyites, cultural marxists, progressives whatever you call them) have made an informal alliance with what used to be their devil - the more capitalist internationalists (corporate people). That alliance was allowed to bloom as the left has shifted into more cultural (rather than economic) form of marxism, which we see in practice as much higher focus of the left on identity and cultural issues rather than anything related to the working class, especially working class of western countries. If not for that, they would be locked in conflict with the capitalist internationalists. But now they can ally over their shared internationalism, even if they hold that view for very different reasons.

• We ought to put an end to stifling bureaucratic institutions that threaten our way of life.

Basic political maneuvering - depends who controls the bureaucratic institutions.
Now that they can get them to threaten the other side's way of life they are fine.

• The banker cartels control everything, and foreign debt enriches shady special interests.

Combination of previous points.

• Our media is 24/7 corporate propaganda spew.

Back to alliance with corporations - the progressive cultural narrative is set of demands that the corporations can afford to negotiate with, as opposed to the "classic" socialist ones.

• We need more unionism to protect our high-paying skilled labor jobs.

Not much changed there, except for internationalist "workarounds" being accepted by the left.

• The perpetual security state makes the underclass fight their stupid petrodollar wars for them.

Again depends on who does it serve and who does it do favors for.

 

[King Krávoka]

It is not "Left Wing", it is CO-DIV 21. The use of sexualities, ethnicities and other human qualities labeled "diverse" within occidental politics by corporations as a marketing tool, which has the secondary side effect of using intersectionality as an attack vector for the psychic neutering of communist and feminist ideology-the human soul, butchered, canned and then labeled. As CO-DIV 21 is disseminated through a subversive ideology, it becomes forbidden to criticize memes that are inherently beholden to the forces holding stock in them.

When the left wing was "ooed" by rainbow holidays and human genomass extraction sites, that gave CO-DIV 21 opportunity to jettison ideas which would be harmful to sales. Peer pressure within these communities is key to dissolving worldviews which are internally consistent enough to suspect any perspective on a topic but that which has been approved by CO-DIV 21. CO-DIV 21 policies are have no consistency beyond fitting the central aspects of CO-DIV 21:
CORPORATIONS
BEFORE
DIVERSITY
IN THE 21ST CENTURY

CO-DIV 21 relies on peer pressure to prevent logical connections which could expose the internal inconsistency which a feminist, constructivist, communist, etc, viewpoint on the topic would find. When CO-DIV 21 has found a profitable way to co-opt a progressive meme, it becomes codified, commodified, and controlled through the media. Leftist spaces on the internet are highly concurrent with CO-DIV 21 stances on social issues and just COMPARE that with the absent orthodoxy of right wing spaces.

 

[S'task]

To be frank, if you thought some of those areas were purely the domain of the left prior to the 00s, you weren't paying attention:

The opposition to globalism and foreign debt was because of sweatshops and structural adjustment programs that enabled wealthy nations to prey on the poor.

There's been a long strain of anti-globalism in the American right and centrism going back a long way. In the 90s it was actually the more centrist Ross Perot and the Reform Party that was the dominate anti-globalism expression in politics. In point of fact, Trump and Perot basically have very little difference in their platforms, the core difference being is that Trump made nice with the social conservative wing of the right while Perot and the Reform Party hemmed and hawed about it.

Further on the right Paleoconservatism had long been anti-globalist and there were significant factions of the Republican Party that were actually Paleoconservative.

The opposition to bureaucracy was because it was viewed as destructive to life and liberty; inhuman and robotic, opposed to all of our creative energies.

Again, opposition to bureaucracy has long had a home in the Republican party and the American right. I mean, Reagan was pushing to abolish the Department of Education back in the 1980s:


There's also been a quietly growing understanding on the right that Democratic presidents have been weaponizing the DC bureaucracy against grassroots right wing politics. From Kennedy to Obama there's a long history of the DC bureaucracy being weaponized against everyday right wing Americans that is beginning to be realized by many on the right.

Anti-interventionism was aimed at protecting civilians in other countries from becoming victims of imperialist aggression.

Again, ant-interventionism has a long history on the American right as well. Again, I point back to the Paleoconservative wing of the Republicans as holding such values.

I suspect you'd find that there's a lot of right wing history supporting those other positions too if you looked into them more in depth. They were just not previously given much exposure due to media bias and not necessarily holding much power in the Republican party.

 

[Deleted member 88]

Left and right are a false difference that only works because of the defacto two party system in America and the UK. The UK right or 'conservative party' spouts talking points from the left now because they pretty much are the left from years ago. They are socially liberal but economically conservative. The conservatives allowed gay marriage and mass migration for fucks sakes. They conserve nothing.

Except their own bank accounts.

 

[Morphic Tide]

They conserve nothing.

Correction, they only conserve. The issue is that, while they do resist quite vocally, they never reverse the laws once passed; once it is no longer conserved, it is never reclaimed. Though admittedly the gay marriage thing actually does follow from the separation of church and state, as every damn time it's been argued against, it comes down to religious beliefs of homosexuality being immoral, or of marriage being a formalizing of prospective parenthood, or some other argument that has nothing to do with the structure of the laws on the book.

 

[Iconoclast]

Left-wing ideology when I was a kid was like...

The Shock of Victory

David Graeber The Shock of Victory 2007 Also published in “Rolling Thunder: an anarchist journal of dangerous living”, number 5 by the CrimethInc....

theanarchistlibrary.org

The IMF was always the arch-villain of the struggle. It is the most powerful, most arrogant, most pitiless instrument through which neoliberal policies have, for the last 25 years been imposed on the poorer countries of the global South, basically, by manipulating debt. In exchange for emergency refinancing, the IMF would demand “structural adjustment programs” that forced massive cuts in health, education, price supports on food, and endless privatization schemes that allowed foreign capitalists to buy up local resources at firesale prices. Structural adjustment never somehow worked to get countries back on their feet economically, but that just meant they remained in crisis, and the solution was always to insist on yet another round of structural adjustment.

The IMF had another, less celebrated, role: of global enforcer. It was their job to ensure that no country (no matter how poor) could ever be allowed to default on loans to Western bankers (no matter how foolish). Even if a banker were to offer a corrupt dictator a billion dollar loan, and that dictator placed it directly in his Swiss bank account and fled the country, the IMF would ensure billion dollars (plus generous interest) would have to be extracted from his former victims. If a country did default, for any reason, the IMF could impose a credit boycott whose economic effects were roughly comparable to that of a nuclear bomb. (All this flies in the face of even elementary economic theory, whereby those lending money are supposed to be accepting a certain degree of risk, but in the world of international politics, economic laws are only held to be binding on the poor.) This role was their downfall.

What happened was that Argentina defaulted and got away with it. In the ‘90s, Argentina had been the IMF’s star pupil in Latin America — they had literally privatized every public facility except the customs bureau. Then in 2002, the economy crashed. The immediate results we all know: battles in the streets, popular assemblies, the overthrow of three governments in one month, road blockades, occupied factories... “Horizontalism” — broadly anarchist principles — were at the core of popular resistance. The political class was so completely discredited that politicians were obliged to put on wigs and phony mustaches to be able to eat in restaurants without being physically attacked. When Nestor Kirchner, a moderate social democrat, took power in 2003, he knew he had to do something dramatic in order to get most of the population even to accept even the idea of having a government, let alone his own. So he did. He did, in fact, the one thing no one in that position is ever supposed to do. He defaulted on Argentina’s foreign debt.

Kosovo: Where NATO Bombing Only Made the Killing Worse

The Big Lie: From Serbia to Syria

www.counterpunch.org

So, was there serious evidence of a Serbian campaign of Genocide in Kosovo? It’s an important issue, since the NATO powers, fortified by a chorus from the liberal intelligentsia, flourished the charge of genocide as justification for bombing that destroyed much of Serbia’s economy and killed around 2,000 civilians, with elevated death levels predicted for years to come.

Whatever horrors they may have been planning, the Serbs were not engaged in genocidal activities in Kosovo before the bombing began. They were fighting a separatist movement, led by the KLA, and behaving with the brutality typical of security forces, though to a degree infinitely more restrained than those backed by the United States in Central America. One common estimate of the number of Kosovar Albanians killed in the year before the bombing is 2,500. With NATO’s bombing came the flights and expulsions and charges that the Serbs were accelerating a genocidal plan; on some accounts, as many as 100,000 were already dead. An alternative assessment was that NATO’s bombing was largely to blame for the expulsions and killings.

After the war was over, on June 25, Bill Clinton told a White House press conference that on Slobodan Milosevic’s orders “tens of thousands of people” had been killed in Kosovo. A week before, from the British Foreign Office came the statement from Geoff Hoon that “according to the reports we had gathered, mostly from the refugees, it appeared that around 10,000 people [that is, Kosovar Albanians] had been killed in more than 100 massacres.” Of course, the US and British governments had an obvious motive in painting as horrifying a picture as possible of what the Serbs had been up to, since the bombing had come under increasingly fierce attack, with rifts in the NATO alliance.

Fahrenheit 9/11 - Wikiquote

en.wikiquote.org

While Bush was busy taking care of his base and professing his love for our troops, he proposed cutting combat soldiers' pay by 33% and assistance to their families by 60%. He opposed giving veterans a billion dollars more in health care benefits, and he supported closing veteran hospitals. He tried to double the prescription drug costs for veterans and opposed full benefits for part-time reservists. And when Staff Sergeant Brett Petriken from Flint was killed in Iraq on May 26, the army sent his last paycheck to his family, but they docked him for the last five days of the month that he didn't work because he was dead.

And left-wing ideology nowadays is like...

Ex-professor accused of hitting Trump supporters with bike lock at 'free speech' rally in Berkeley gets probation

A former community college professor and anti-fascist activist as part of a plea agreement pleaded no contest to misdemeanor assault for allegedly hitting supporters of President Trump with a bike lock at a political rally in Berkeley last year.

www.foxnews.com

Eric Clanton, 29, agreed to the deal on Wednesday in the Alameda County Superior Court, his attorney Daniel Siegal said. He was sentenced to three years of probation, which will end on Aug. 8, 2021, Berkleyside.com reported.

The Alameda County district attorney's office initially charged Clanton with felonies for hitting several pro-Trump demonstrators on the head with a bicycle lock during a “free the speech” demonstration in Civic Center Park in Berkeley on April 15, 2017. The attack was captured on camera and posted on YouTube.

What We Can All Learn from Drag Queens

5 life lessons

medium.com

When I was younger, I used to harbor resentment towards others in the LGBTQIA community who, in my view, strayed too far from the societal norm and made “us” (the collective gays, in my mind) stand out in a “bad” way. I didn’t want others defining me as any less of a man, so I hated seeing men dressed up as women becoming a stereotype of gay culture.

It took me several years of living my own truth and getting to know a much more diverse group of people for my misguided thinking to finally evolve. Now, I not only appreciate the work of drag queens, but I’m one of their biggest fans.

“Left Communists” and “Ultra-Leftists” Are Reactionaries

Their debased and debilitating position must be rejected.

medium.com

Ultras and left-coms are exactly the same as pro-lifers: technically of course it is true that abortions are not nice, and that wage labor isn’t communism. But what they fail to factor into their shallow and short-sighted idealistic analysis are a myriad of real life material conditions and situations which not only complicate, but render their positions untenable, such as those faced by pregnant women in the context of patriarchy, and those faced by socialist transitional states in the context of global capital.

According to them, unless abstract value production and wage labor is immediately and completely abolished, it isn’t real socialism. Thus no real socialism has ever existed (for more than 3 hours), nor will it ever exist in a world dominated by the logic of capital — so just sit back, enjoy the theoretical circle jerk, and feel good about how smart we are. Also, geopolitics can be ignored, international diplomacy if of zero consequence, and the fate of human lives are unimportant, if ideological purity is retained.

Notice anything? The leftism of 20 years ago was an actual threat to establishment power and to corporatism and consumerism and the degradation of our rights and all this bullcrap that's foisted on us 24/7.

The leftism of today is a pale imitation, lost so far up its own ass that it wastes time defending negative rights instead of securing positive ones.

For instance, gay marriage is not the same thing as a higher minimum wage. You know why? It's because while increasing the minimum wage involves clawing back money from the class that pays our wages, gay marriage involves the removal of an obstruction for free. It requires absolutely no participation or effort on the part of the powers-that-be to allow people the right to marry.

Negative and positive rights - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Rights considered negative rights may include civil and political rights such as freedom of speech, life, private property, freedom from violent crime, freedom of religion, habeas corpus, a fair trial, and freedom from slavery.

Rights considered positive rights, as initially proposed in 1979 by the Czech jurist Karel Vašák, may include other civil and political rights such as police protection of person and property and the right to counsel, as well as economic, social and cultural rights such as food, housing, public education, employment, national security, military, health care, social security, internet access, and a minimum standard of living. In the "three generations" account of human rights, negative rights are often associated with the first generation of rights, while positive rights are associated with the second and third generations.

David Graeber put it best:

https://libcom.org/files/David_Graeber-The_Utopia_of_Rules_On_Technology_St.pdf

So: what would a left-wing critique of total, or predatory, bureaucratization look like? I think the story of the Global Justice Movement provides a hint—because it was a movement that, rather to its own surprise, discovered this was what it was about. I remember this quite well because I was deeply involved in the movement at the time. Back in the 1990s, “globalization,” as touted by journalists like Thomas Friedman (but really, by the entire journalistic establishment in the United States and most of it in other wealthy countries) was portrayed as an almost natural force. Technological advances—particularly the Internet—were knitting the world together as never before, increased communication was leading to increased trade, and national borders were rapidly becoming irrelevant as free trade treaties united the globe into a single world market. In political debates of the time in the mainstream media, all of this was discussed as such a self-evident reality that anyone who objected to the process could be treated as if they were objecting to basic laws of nature—they were flat-earthers, buffoons, the left-wing equivalents of Biblical fundamentalists who thought evolution was a hoax. Thus when the Global Justice Movement started, the media spin was that it was a rearguard action of hoary, carbuncular leftists who wished to restore protectionism, national sovereignty, barriers to trade and communication, and, generally, to vainly stand against the Inevitable Tide of History. The problem with this was that it was obviously untrue. Most immediately, there was the fact that the protestors’ average age, especially in the wealthier countries, seemed to be about nineteen. More seriously, there was the fact that the movement was a form of globalization in itself: a kaleidoscopic alliance of people from every corner of the world, including organizations ranging from Indian farmers’ associations, to the Canadian postal workers’ union, to indigenous groups in Panama, to anarchist collectives in Detroit. What’s more, its exponents endlessly insisted that despite protestations to the contrary, what the media was calling “globalization” had almost nothing to do with the effacement of borders and the free movement of people, products, and ideas. It was really about trapping increasingly large parts of the world’s population behind highly militarized national borders within which social protections could be systematically withdrawn, creating a pool of laborers so desperate that they would be willing to work for almost nothing. Against it, they proposed a genuinely borderless world. Obviously, these ideas’ exponents did not get to say any of this on TV or major newspapers—at least not in countries like America, whose media is strictly policed by its own internal corporate bureaucrats. Such arguments were, effectively, taboo. But we discovered that there was something we could do that worked almost as well. We could besiege the summits where the trade pacts were negotiated and the annual meetings of the institutions through which the terms of what was called globalization were actually concocted, encoded, and enforced. Until the movement came to North America with the siege of the World Trade Meeting in Seattle in November 1999—and subsequent blockades against the IMF/World Bank Meetings in Washington—most Americans simply had no idea that any of these organizations even existed. The actions operated like a magic charm that exposed everything that was supposed to be hidden: all we had to do was show up and try to block access to the venue, and instantly we revealed the existence of a vast global bureaucracy of interlocking organizations that nobody was supposed to really think about. And of course, at the same time, we would magically whisk into existence thousands of heavily armed riot police ready to reveal just what those bureaucrats were willing to unleash against anyone—no matter how nonviolent—who tried to stand in their way.

I watch leftists wasting their time with boutique ideology, with high-minded, ivory-tower crap, and it's like, what the hell are they doing? The Gilded Age is back. Wealth inequality is worse than ever. People are struggling with third-world-level poverty in one of the richest countries in the world. The concentration of money in fewer and fewer hands and the erosion of the middle class continues at a startling pace:

1. Trends in income and wealth inequality

Barely 10 years past the end of the Great Recession in 2009, the U.S. economy is doing well on several fronts. The labor market is on a job-creating

www.pewsocialtrends.org

Investors bitch and moan when employees get raises, complaining that they aren't getting their slice of the pie first.

American Airlines gave its workers a raise. Wall Street freaked out.

This is why we can’t have nice things.

www.vox.com

No wonder why people keep turning to state socialism, in spite of its historical failures. They keep treating people like animals, making them work like dogs for a pittance.

Inside Amazon: Wrestling Big Ideas in a Bruising Workplace (Published 2015)

The company is conducting an experiment in how far it can push white-collar workers to get them to achieve its ever-expanding ambitions.

www.nytimes.com

How can we turn this state of affairs around? Well, that's simple. We need a healthy capitalism and fair wages, and for that, we need to stop giving all of the goddamn surplus in our economy to investors. I say that as someone who has invested before, and will invest in the future. We need to stop giving investors so much goddamn money.

How To Fix Stagnant Wages: Dump The World's Dumbest Idea

Stagnant worker salaries are a feature of the current economy, not a bug.

www.forbes.com

The fact is that in the 1980s and beyond, public companies began embracing a very different idea as to the purpose of a firm: the idea that the sole purpose of a corporation is to maximize shareholder value. Then, as executives were compensated massively with stock options to sharpen their focus on increasing shareholder value at the expense of everything else, and activist hedge funds began reinforcing the focus with corporate raids on firms that didn’t buy into the doctrine, public companies began to focus totally on maximizing shareholder as reflected in current the stock price.

Previously, firms had sought to balance the needs of all the stakeholders—customers, employees, shareholders and the community. Workers were valued both as contributors to the gains that had already been made and as the creators of future growth. But once shareholder value thinking took over, workers came to be seen as expendable commodities, whose training for the future and career development were simply not their problem. No responsibility was felt to those employees who had helped create the wealth of the company. Instead, corporate raiders, who had played no role in creating that wealth, extracted much of the gains, which they then used to conduct more raids.

People with degrees are flipping burgers. Underemployment is everywhere. This is a recipe for years and years of resentment, polarization, and political strife. No wonder everyone wants a handout. They can't get by, with the cost of living being what it is, on these minimum-wage jobs. We're all being driven deeper into debt, and the usurers of the world keep pocketing the surplus represented by all our congealed labor.

Survey finds millions of Americans are underemployed

Though full time opportunities do exist, the data shows.

www.monster.com

So, who's supporting all this faux-leftism we keep seeing?

Wealthy donors who have a vested interest in keeping us all divided, of course.

George Soros and the Demonization of Philanthropy

Conspiracy theories about him obscure the real concerns about how large-scale giving works today.

www.theatlantic.com

Opinion | Beware Rich People Who Say They Want to Change the World (Published 2018)

Society’s winners can seem so generous, until you consider what they’re really selling.

www.nytimes.com

These bastards soak up all the wealth, and then they use that wealth to manipulate our politics to funnel them even more wealth and power. What do they do with all that power? They try and take away our rights. They try and turn us into their fucking cattle. They censor our social media platforms, they control the narrative, they own all the old media and use it to spew their propaganda and manipulate people. Our party politics are about as authentic as pro wrestling. Staged from top to bottom.



What are we going to do about this? Just sit here and take it?

 

[Duke Nukem]

Left-wing ideology when I was a kid was like...

The Shock of Victory

David Graeber The Shock of Victory 2007 Also published in “Rolling Thunder: an anarchist journal of dangerous living”, number 5 by the CrimethInc....

theanarchistlibrary.org

Kosovo: Where NATO Bombing Only Made the Killing Worse

The Big Lie: From Serbia to Syria

www.counterpunch.org

Fahrenheit 9/11 - Wikiquote

en.wikiquote.org

And left-wing ideology nowadays is like...

Ex-professor accused of hitting Trump supporters with bike lock at 'free speech' rally in Berkeley gets probation

A former community college professor and anti-fascist activist as part of a plea agreement pleaded no contest to misdemeanor assault for allegedly hitting supporters of President Trump with a bike lock at a political rally in Berkeley last year.

www.foxnews.com

What We Can All Learn from Drag Queens

5 life lessons

medium.com

“Left Communists” and “Ultra-Leftists” Are Reactionaries

Their debased and debilitating position must be rejected.

medium.com

Notice anything? The leftism of 20 years ago was an actual threat to establishment power and to corporatism and consumerism and the degradation of our rights and all this bullcrap that's foisted on us 24/7.

The leftism of today is a pale imitation, lost so far up its own ass that it wastes time defending negative rights instead of securing positive ones.

For instance, gay marriage is not the same thing as a higher minimum wage. You know why? It's because while increasing the minimum wage involves clawing back money from the class that pays our wages, gay marriage involves the removal of an obstruction for free. It requires absolutely no participation or effort on the part of the powers-that-be to allow people the right to marry.

Negative and positive rights - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

David Graeber put it best:

https://libcom.org/files/David_Graeber-The_Utopia_of_Rules_On_Technology_St.pdf

I watch leftists wasting their time with boutique ideology, with high-minded, ivory-tower crap, and it's like, what the hell are they doing? The Gilded Age is back. Wealth inequality is worse than ever. People are struggling with third-world-level poverty in one of the richest countries in the world. The concentration of money in fewer and fewer hands and the erosion of the middle class continues at a startling pace:

1. Trends in income and wealth inequality

Barely 10 years past the end of the Great Recession in 2009, the U.S. economy is doing well on several fronts. The labor market is on a job-creating

www.pewsocialtrends.org

Investors bitch and moan when employees get raises, complaining that they aren't getting their slice of the pie first.

American Airlines gave its workers a raise. Wall Street freaked out.

This is why we can’t have nice things.

www.vox.com

No wonder why people keep turning to state socialism, in spite of its historical failures. They keep treating people like animals, making them work like dogs for a pittance.

Inside Amazon: Wrestling Big Ideas in a Bruising Workplace (Published 2015)

The company is conducting an experiment in how far it can push white-collar workers to get them to achieve its ever-expanding ambitions.

www.nytimes.com

How can we turn this state of affairs around? Well, that's simple. We need a healthy capitalism and fair wages, and for that, we need to stop giving all of the goddamn surplus in our economy to investors. I say that as someone who has invested before, and will invest in the future. We need to stop giving investors so much goddamn money.

How To Fix Stagnant Wages: Dump The World's Dumbest Idea

Stagnant worker salaries are a feature of the current economy, not a bug.

www.forbes.com

People with degrees are flipping burgers. Underemployment is everywhere. This is a recipe for years and years of resentment, polarization, and political strife. No wonder everyone wants a handout. They can't get by, with the cost of living being what it is, on these minimum-wage jobs. We're all being driven deeper into debt, and the usurers of the world keep pocketing the surplus represented by all our congealed labor.

Survey finds millions of Americans are underemployed

Though full time opportunities do exist, the data shows.

www.monster.com

So, who's supporting all this faux-leftism we keep seeing?

Wealthy donors who have a vested interest in keeping us all divided, of course.

George Soros and the Demonization of Philanthropy

Conspiracy theories about him obscure the real concerns about how large-scale giving works today.

www.theatlantic.com

Opinion | Beware Rich People Who Say They Want to Change the World (Published 2018)

Society’s winners can seem so generous, until you consider what they’re really selling.

www.nytimes.com

These bastards soak up all the wealth, and then they use that wealth to manipulate our politics to funnel them even more wealth and power. What do they do with all that power? They try and take away our rights. They try and turn us into their fucking cattle. They censor our social media platforms, they control the narrative, they own all the old media and use it to spew their propaganda and manipulate people. Our party politics are about as authentic as pro wrestling. Staged from top to bottom.



What are we going to do about this? Just sit here and take it?

As long as the American people remain selfish and ignorant there's always going to be selfish and morally corrupt people getting put into positions of power.

So basically i don't this changing anytime soon.

 

[Iconoclast]

As long as the American people remain selfish and ignorant there's always going to be selfish and morally corrupt people getting put into positions of power.

So basically i don't this changing anytime soon.

When payment processors began cutting off service to various right-wing causes, some lefties cheered.

PayPal, GoFundMe, And Patreon Banned A Bunch Of People Associated With The Alt-Right. Here's Why.

Several prominent members of the so-called alt-right have found themselves at a loss for an online funding platform in recent months.

www.buzzfeednews.com

PayPal Cuts Off Alex Jones’s Infowars, Joining Other Tech Giants (Published 2018)

PayPal will stop processing all payments for the conspiracy website, its online store and its subsidiaries.

www.nytimes.com

Why some businesses aren’t allowed

We’re building business infrastructure. As with other kinds of infrastructure (like hosting or electricity), we'd like to make it available to as broad a set of users as possible.

stripe.com

Payment processor Stripe freezes account of far-right friendly Gab

The "free speech" site has become a haven for those kicked off mainstream platforms.

archive.thinkprogress.org

When I saw that, when I realized that corporations like PayPal and Stripe and Gofundme can literally become gatekeepers of speech, I was fucking horrified. This is not what the internet was meant to be, with centralized control dominating everything.

That's why I support efforts to Lock the web Open.

Locking the Web Open: A Call for a Decentralized Web | Brewster Kahle's Blog

brewster.kahle.org

We need a decentralized internet, where people have decentralized payment services, decentralized hosting, decentralized domain names, et cetera, to shift power away from big companies like Reddit and Tencent and Twitter and Facebook and put that power back in the hands of the people where it belongs.

 

[Duke Nukem]

When payment processors began cutting off service to various right-wing causes, some lefties cheered.

PayPal, GoFundMe, And Patreon Banned A Bunch Of People Associated With The Alt-Right. Here's Why.

Several prominent members of the so-called alt-right have found themselves at a loss for an online funding platform in recent months.

www.buzzfeednews.com

PayPal Cuts Off Alex Jones’s Infowars, Joining Other Tech Giants (Published 2018)

PayPal will stop processing all payments for the conspiracy website, its online store and its subsidiaries.

www.nytimes.com

Why some businesses aren’t allowed

We’re building business infrastructure. As with other kinds of infrastructure (like hosting or electricity), we'd like to make it available to as broad a set of users as possible.

stripe.com

Payment processor Stripe freezes account of far-right friendly Gab

The "free speech" site has become a haven for those kicked off mainstream platforms.

archive.thinkprogress.org

When I saw that, when I realized that corporations like PayPal and Stripe and Gofundme can literally become gatekeepers of speech, I was fucking horrified. This is not what the internet was meant to be, with centralized control dominating everything.

That's why I support efforts to Lock the web Open.

Locking the Web Open: A Call for a Decentralized Web | Brewster Kahle's Blog

brewster.kahle.org

We need a decentralized internet, where people have decentralized payment services, decentralized hosting, decentralized domain names, et cetera, to shift power away from big companies like Reddit and Tencent and Twitter and Facebook and put that power back in the hands of the people where it belongs.

Would take a damn miracle for that to ever happen in our lifetimes.

 

[Marduk]

Notice anything? The leftism of 20 years ago was an actual threat to establishment power and to corporatism and consumerism and the degradation of our rights and all this bullcrap that's foisted on us 24/7.

The leftism of today is a pale imitation, lost so far up its own ass that it wastes time defending negative rights instead of securing positive ones.

For instance, gay marriage is not the same thing as a higher minimum wage. You know why? It's because while increasing the minimum wage involves clawing back money from the class that pays our wages, gay marriage involves the removal of an obstruction for free. It requires absolutely no participation or effort on the part of the powers-that-be to allow people the right to marry.

The fight for minimum wage is just a simple example of how the "pro worker" movement is plainly trapped in the socialist talking points. Sure, its convenient for the big business to not raise it (in US context), but hey, a number of european countries have high minimum wage, and things are not exactly great for them as the US socialists would hope they would become. The whole point has just become outmaneuvered by the other side through at least 4 ways:
-Legal arrangements of all varieties in which minimum wage (and many other regulations) do not apply. A lot of work that traditionally was done on normal full time employment is getting shifted to this format everywhere, especially with minimum wage rises.
-Non formal arrangements. The famous fresh case is the hoopla about "crunch" abuse in IT companies is close to that, and it also happens in many other areas. Basically, company pays people at or even well over minimum wage, but... they are expected to spend many, many hours more working than they are getting officially paid for. Anyone who doesn't play along gets fired. On paper everything is ok. In effect company gets a given amount of work-hours for much less than it seems to be paying.
And then there is the general gray market labor/employing illegals.
-Get cheap labor from elsewhere, on separate arrangements. Famous fresh case, the whole thing with Chinese textile workers in Italy. Anyone gonna ask the question why a moderately rich EU country with lasting crisis and very high unemployment needs to import textile workers from another continent?
-Move all labor intensive operations to where cheap labor is. The last and most extreme one, but as you see with popularity of outsourcing, not rare at all.

Look at the issue in the context of laws of supply and demand, basic market economics, and suddenly its not mysterious at all. Of course the employers won't pay much if they have plentiful access to cheap labor. Why pay more, when they can pay less? At worst they will have to move operations to another country, and that's where globalism/internationalism comes in, reducing the costs, tensions and risks of that maneuver.

And from that point you can see why the international business sees the western hard-line nationalist right as far more of a threat than the left. What the hard right wants to do, whether for this or unrelated reasons (taking an axe to immigration and outsourcing) would interfere badly with these schemes, and intended or not, would reduce access to cheap labor, with the implied effect of turning the labor market into more of seller's market, which in turn would mean that workers could expect higher wages (most certainly not as high as they would want to hear and the socialists are willing to promise, but higher than otherwise for sure).
The side effect of that would also be to make automation (and development of further technology for it) of more workplaces worthwhile.

Meanwhile, the left is fighting hard for a poor measure that the big business already has good and well tested workarounds developed for, while distracted by silly identity politics, green agenda and virtue signalling. And that's why the modern left is such a joke.

 

[Iconoclast]

The fight for minimum wage is just a simple example of how the "pro worker" movement is plainly trapped in the socialist talking points. Sure, its convenient for the big business to not raise it (in US context), but hey, a number of european countries have high minimum wage, and things are not exactly great for them as the US socialists would hope they would become. The whole point has just become outmaneuvered by the other side through at least 4 ways:
-Legal arrangements of all varieties in which minimum wage (and many other regulations) do not apply. A lot of work that traditionally was done on normal full time employment is getting shifted to this format everywhere, especially with minimum wage rises.
-Non formal arrangements. The famous fresh case is the hoopla about "crunch" abuse in IT companies is close to that, and it also happens in many other areas. Basically, company pays people at or even well over minimum wage, but... they are expected to spend many, many hours more working than they are getting officially paid for. Anyone who doesn't play along gets fired. On paper everything is ok. In effect company gets a given amount of work-hours for much less than it seems to be paying.
And then there is the general gray market labor/employing illegals.
-Get cheap labor from elsewhere, on separate arrangements. Famous fresh case, the whole thing with Chinese textile workers in Italy. Anyone gonna ask the question why a moderately rich EU country with lasting crisis and very high unemployment needs to import textile workers from another continent?
-Move all labor intensive operations to where cheap labor is. The last and most extreme one, but as you see with popularity of outsourcing, not rare at all.

Look at the issue in the context of laws of supply and demand, basic market economics, and suddenly its not mysterious at all. Of course the employers won't pay much if they have plentiful access to cheap labor. Why pay more, when they can pay less? At worst they will have to move operations to another country, and that's where globalism/internationalism comes in, reducing the costs, tensions and risks of that maneuver.

And from that point you can see why the international business sees the western hard-line nationalist right as far more of a threat than the left. What the hard right wants to do, whether for this or unrelated reasons (taking an axe to immigration and outsourcing) would interfere badly with these schemes, and intended or not, would reduce access to cheap labor, with the implied effect of turning the labor market into more of seller's market, which in turn would mean that workers could expect higher wages (most certainly not as high as they would want to hear and the socialists are willing to promise, but higher than otherwise for sure).
The side effect of that would also be to make automation (and development of further technology for it) of more workplaces worthwhile.

Meanwhile, the left is fighting hard for a poor measure that the big business already has good and well tested workarounds developed for, while distracted by silly identity politics, green agenda and virtue signalling. And that's why the modern left is such a joke.

Nothing about the past 20 years makes any sense to me at all.

Beginning with 9/11, there has been a huge erosion of people's rights in the West, accompanied by the creeping rise of the surveillance state. Nobody cares that there are CCTV cameras, RFID readers and chain-link fences everywhere, now.

Saddam didn't have WMDs, and Afghanistan wasn't hiding OBL. Nobody cares that we basically killed a quarter of a million people to get one guy.

Obama campaigned on a promise to close Gitmo and end the Bush-era warmongering. He did neither of these things. In fact, years later, he pulls a Bill Clinton and starts even more shit. Nobody cares about this, least of all the voting public. In fact, they elected him for a second term.

The Iraq War Logs and the US Diplomatic Cables are leaked on Wikileaks, showing all the blue-on-blue incidents and how Iraq had death squads and torture units that the US supported, as well as the disgusting backroom deals that occurred in the years previous. Nobody cares.

Chinese sweatshops work teenagers to the fucking bone, making them live in cockroach-infested dormitories and take sponge baths, and paying them half a dollar a fucking hour to work fifteen, even sixteen hours a day, sticking feet on the bottom of computer mice. Also, Foxconn (Foxdie?) erected suicide nets around their dorms because their workers were so despondent that they were jumping off of them and going splat on the pavement. Nobody cares. Fuck 'em. We need our mice and we need our phones.

All the columbite-tantalite we need for the niobium and tantalum in all our tech comes out of the Congo, with steely-eyed sentries roaming around with AK-47s and watching over workers sifting through mud with their bare hands, their finger not far from the trigger should the local warlord's slaves decide to flee. This is where all our smartphones come from. Nobody gives one single fuck.

Osama Bin Laden was hiding out in Pakistan, our alleged ally. In Abbottabad, no less, which is basically the West Point of Pakistan. There is no way that the ISI didn't know exactly where he was, and yet, he hid out for years there and no one gave a fuck. Also, no one seemed to give a shit about Al-Qaeda's obvious Saudi connections and funding. Also, Pakistan straight up gave intel on the broken-off tail boom of our super-secret crashed stealth Blackhawk to the Chinese, but nobody cares.

A bunch of spook-sponsored fake color revolution activists started shit all across the Middle East, and then the Responsibility to Protect (a.k.a. "Humanitarian Invasions", a.k.a. "Imperialism with a Smile") was used as an excuse to bomb the fuck out of Libya, destroying their government and a great deal of valuable civilian infrastructure. Libya is now a failed state, years later, and we abandoned those people to their fate, but nobody cares.

We gave shitloads of weapons to Syrian rebels through operation Timber Sycamore. Salafi assholes were filming themselves shouting Takbirs while firing TOW missiles, which each cost as much as a brand-new Corvette, at Syrian and Russian tanks. Nobody cares that we just spent thousands of American lives and trillions of dollars over the course of a decade hunting down and killing Salafi motherfuckers, just to arm another bunch of them just like the Mujahideen back in the eighties.

The CIA torture report was published, confirming that, yes indeed, the CIA tortures and rapes people. Nobody seems to give a shit that our tax dollars funded torture and rape. In fact, people cared more about the fictional Sansa Stark being raped by the equally fictional Ramsay Bolton than they did about actual people having feeding tubes shoved up their asses by our government. Before you say they deserved it, many Gitmo detainees were random people off the street who were literally sold to us.

People made a big huge deal about Trump being tough on immigration, despite the fact that Obama and Biden loved deporting the fuck out of people. Obama kept people in cages, first. Nobody cares.

Refugees from Syria literally sell their fucking kidneys to human traffickers to flee the violence and instability. We made these people homeless with our own actions. Nobody cares. In fact, the media doesn't even refer to where these people even came from by name. They're just "refugees", as if they came out of the fucking ether. Nobody cares about that, either.

All our media is owned and operated by six giant, monopolistic corporations, spewing propaganda at the American public, but nobody cares. Also, our government made it legal to spew propaganda at us, and nobody cares about that, either.

Apple, Google, and Facebook are all gigantic fucking trusts on-par with Standard Oil. Nobody cares. Who will break them up, anyway? Who has the balls? They own all our politicians. They gather data on all of us and they invade our privacy, and nobody cares. In fact, we straight-up fucking give them all our fucking information. When you sign up for Facebook, they already know who all your friends are, because they have Facebook, and Facebook has access to their contacts. Zuckerberg can surmise exactly who you are even if you aren't on his fucking service. Nobody cares about this.

Jeff Epstein clearly didn't kill himself, and Bill Clinton and Prince Andrew clearly didn't fly on his plane just so they could sit on the beach and sip Mai Tais in the Caribbean. Nobody cares. It's old hat. It's yesterday's news. Look! Virus!

Wikileaks released the OPCW Douma files showing that the OPCW tried quashing a contradictory report that showed that not only did the alleged gas canisters appear to have been hand-placed by people on the ground, the concentrations of chlorine were in the parts-per-billion range, similar to what you'd expect from the use of household bleach.

Chinese scientists tried smuggling biological samples out of a BSL-4 lab in Canada and out of Boston's Logan International Airport, but nobody cares. That's obviously nothing. Somebody ate bat soup and started coofing. The virus definitely didn't come out of a laboratory. They didn't steal coronavirus samples. They tried stealing Ebola and Nipah, two extremely deadly pathogens, but just ignore that. It wasn't SARS, so it doesn't matter. Oh, wait, China bought up all our PPE and we hate them, now, so maybe it did come out of a laboratory.

Julian Assange got treated to a Kafkaesque trial where he's kept separate from his own lawyers in a glass box and can't even pass notes to them. Besides, isn't he a rapist, or something? Don't you know you can't get away with rape unless you're Joe Biden? Anyway, nobody cares.

On most of the boards I've been on in the past ten years, you can shout about this shit until you're blue in the face, and not a single one of these neoliberal jackholes will shed even one crocodile tear over any of it. Instead, the bunch of psychopaths will slither their snake tongues and blink their nictitating membranes sideways and say "I don't care," without a hint of sarcasm.

Because they don't. They don't care. Nobody cares.

They care more about how video game characters are clothed. They care more about TV shows, books, and movies meeting diversity quotas and works of narrative fiction in general not having naughty plot devices in them like racism, rape, and rapism, or whatever.

The more I look at the state of the planet today, the more convinced I am that the NPC meme and clown world are an accurate portrayal of our present state of affairs.

It wasn't the Ben Shapiros and Steve Bannons of the world who led me to this conclusion.

It was talking with liberals. Just, you know. Conversing with them idly for the better part of a decade until I grew so disgusted that I just couldn't take it anymore.

 

[Lanmandragon]

Because until the rise of the internet the left had a near Monopoly on information. So they would push and highlight any and all right wing cenorship. While simultaneously burying thier own cenorship and painting. Thier opponents cenorship in the worst possible light.

 

[LifeisTiresome]

This is a based thread. Simply the best.

@Reveille

What do you think of this?

Its been stated in multiple studies that male testosterone and sperm is going down in the world. Hell, apparently men of today have less testosterone compared to their forefathers.

And we see in the media continuous assaults on men and we even have this:

Can Estrogen and Other Sex Hormones Help Men Survive Covid-19? (Published 2020)

Men are more likely than women to die of the coronavirus, so scientists are treating them with something women have more of: female sex hormones.

www.nytimes.com

Men are more likely than women to die of the coronavirus, so scientists are treating them with something women have more of: female sex hormones.

So lets pump men with female hormones.

And we have the whole transgender pushing which as we see is very heavily focused on MTF's .

Its been said by analysts and governments that young men with nothing are very dangerous as they can do violence or rebel against the government. Men have fought the wars and revolts and revolutions.

And yet men and boys are pushed down by the state, education and women cause of feminism.

Feminism and the state and corporations are all heavily involved with each other.

Hence to me, there is an agenda to weaken men. Either turn them all trans or weaklings who will never question or fight back against the establishment and feminism is part of this movement to weaken men.

What do you think?

@Lanmandragon

How about you?

 

[Doomsought]

Saddam didn't have WMDs, and Afghanistan wasn't hiding OBL.

He did have WMDs, they were just old chemical weapons not nukes like the civvies expected.

 

[CarlManvers2019]

@LifeisTiresome
Going down in the world? You sure that doesn’t only apply to Western & First World Countries?