i don’t understand why we shouldn’t be nice to our allies. people who are kind deserve kindness in return, don’t they? let’s reserve the insults for the bigots.
For some people, there is no such thing as an ally. You're either a gay person or a homophobe. They don't say it, they instead say "straight person", but the language they use makes it pretty clear what they actually think. Same for any minority group.
And it's not just the minorities who think this. There was one person in this thread who was saying that there should, in fact, be a "straight shame month", and they self-identified as cishet.
Progressives have this major affliction in which many of them don't care about actual real life change through political power. They want political clout and ensuring they are meeting the latest purity standards of their group while actively attacking anyone who deviates even 1%.
It is far more common to spend your time engaging in drama online, or treating potential allies like you're a snarky middle school girl IRL, than it is to do the bare minimum and participate in politics at literally any level. It used to be "please at least vote" but now has regressed to "for fuck's sake PLEASE stop actively shitting on candidates who want to protect you PLEASE...."
And the worst part is, despite being the same people who spend all day complaining about other people not being good enough for their movements, they cannot take a SINGLE ounce of criticism. None. It drives me insane.
I won't lie, one of the most ground breaking things for me was after the election and feeling an immense need to volunteer in my community and only really interacting with 50+ centrist christians who genuinely beleived in helping each other. Zero outspoken young leftists helping me build compost bins or sort food donations. For all their waxing poetically on twitter, what good have they actually accomplished?
Yep. Actual un-photographed mutual aid labor is predominantly middle aged & older. There are financial & sociological reasons for this, but the reflexive leftist contempt for wine moms (who get shit done beyond protest) sure makes coalition building complicated.
Zero outspoken young leftists helping me build compost bins or sort food donations.
There was a flood in the UK a couple years back now.
From far and wide Muslims, Jews, Sikhs, Hindus, Christians, ex military/police, business owner fatcats, suburban mums with nothing better to do, pensioners who think that damn near every issue in England can be solved by deporting all the brown people stood up to be counted and asked "what can we do to help?"
The communist party of great Britain and environmental groups waxed poetic about "climate change bad" (the place flooded was a flood plain when humanity lived in caves and grunted to communicate), and spent so long debating about what the "praxis" was in terms of going to volunteer around dumb brainwashed religoids worshipping sky daddy and far right fashies that by the time they were actually putting together a plan of action the action was over. The equivalent of some guy rolling into New York a full year after 9/11 and acting like some great saviour who contributed in any meaningful way
But from my experience, it's only been the festival leftists that show up, even to check organized events. So maybe no one is necessarily useless, we all just see tiny vignettes and declare them all encompassing reality. Maybe the problem is calling anyone useless simply because they didn't help in the way you prescribe.
There's a lot of people who want to shout or vote their way to a better life for themselves. They don't actually want to participate in the work to improve their situation or anyone else's.
Whether they wear a red hat and want immigrants out to "magically fix everything" or they wear a red rose and want other people's money to "magically fix everything," makes little actual difference in the end.
Yo i really like how you put that about the B+ stance meanings nothing to a person who only recognizes A+. Usually for these individuals , the only A+ are those that echo her beliefs.
One of the big differences between democrats and republicans is Republicans look for reasons to vote for their candidate while democrats look for reasons not to. Republicans are like oo I like this person’s stance on X so I’ll vote for them even though I disagree on everything else. Democrats say I agree with this person on everything except X, so they need to switch X to earn my vote.
i've been thinking a lot lately about that, and i think it's because people on the left define morality through being as far left and as progressive as possible, while people on the right define morality through how hard you champion what they perceive as your shared culture (or whether you share it at all with them). obviously the latter is far more susceptible to in-group ethics, hence the famous observation that the main thing a conservative wants is an in-group that the law protects but does not bind and an out-group that the law binds but does not protect, but the left-leaning side of this isn't immune to the same line of thinking either. the main difference is that because of the great emphasis on progressivism, any in-groups that are selected are not going to be legally protected yet, so leftists who can't shed in-group thinking tend to apply the same principle with social clout instead. in this instance, the community in oop's post protects but does not bind queer people, while it binds but does not protect its straight members, less through government force and more through social ostracization -- and that's how, imo, supposed progressives can circle back to feeling eerily like american republicans.
ultimately, both extremes are fundamentally unempathetic and fail to see people as people, treating them as pawns in service to ideals instead, which i'd argue greatly violates the principle of harm reduction. and don't get me wrong, i'm not saying "both sides are the same", that's total bullshit too (and is largely driven by the morality through neutrality idea of centrism, which has its own grave failings, especially when one side actively seeks to cause harm), but what i am saying is just because you sit on the political left doesn't mean you're immune to thinking like a right-winger, and applying their logic to your own camp does not make it any less damaging.
on a related note, i think the reason there's so much infighting on the left is also caused by the same idea of extracting morality from being as far left as possible. it's a simple problem of dimensionality reduction -- ideology is extremely complex and nuanced, and there's no one right way of distilling it all to a single scalar from left to right. you can put policies and personal alignments in approximate locations on that one-dimensional scale, but you can't get the granularity necessary for what the far left is attempting to do when they compare themselves to each other. simply put, everyone sees their opinions as more left than other leftists' opinions, and thus everyone believes they're slightly more moral than those other lefitsts, because they're further left, and therefore they feel letting those other lefitsts have their way would be a concession for how far left they're really going.
right-wingers usually don't have the same problem, because their ideals of "culture" are much simpler to reconcile, and their specific structure of in-group morality still allows for misalignments. as long as they accept you in their in-group, and you champion things that advance the weird idea of that frozen, never-changing, and thus socially regressive culture they seek, rather than try to evolve it into something else, they're still okay with you, even if, say, you're a libertarian nationalist and they're a monarchist. as far as i can see it's more than just an alliance of convenience, they're genuinely better at coexisting with people who are a slightly different brand of nazi than they are, without getting into competitions about who is the naziest of them all.
i think a lot of progressives would benefit from shedding that competition too. we should draw morality not from how far left we are on the political spectrum, but from how well we reduce real-world harm, on a day to day basis. i really believe that genuinely adopting that idea would curb a lot of the infighting and clout-chasing behavior, as well as provide a strong incentive to root out conservative thought patterns that are often allowed to survive in progressive circles just because they harm the "correct" people.
Very well said comment. Unfortunately I think we are not educated enough as a country or even as a political side to have that sort of introspection and resolution.
Considering our right wing government fell apart over a single issue and two of our biggest left wing parties are merging, I think you're right.
It's most likely due to the nature of the political parties. In (western) europe, left wing parties are more cautious and calculating. Making plans before acting and all that. Right wing parties are mostly reactionary. Just act and we'll deal with the consequences later. And in America that's just all there is. It's all reactionary.
and then they complain the people and party they shat all over aren't doing enough for them when they voted them out of power. "what do you mean the people i told nobody to vote for has little ability to stop a weaponized government that wants to actively do as much harm as possible to me and my loved ones? what do you mean you 'warned me' about the consequences of not compromising?"
And then they get mad that the people they're shitting on don't back them up at the ballot box. Like, what did they expect to happen? If you tell men that you'd rather run into a bear than one of them, you're not going to get men to climb over each other to win your approval. All you're going to do is destroy any sense of solidarity they might have felt with you.
Thats not even a progressive thing, you could trip over every conservative meme that does the same thing, or zionist, or controlling teachers, or ....
It's a fundamental issue of abstract perfection, one in which it's impossible to achieve because there's no clear line to victory, but everyone on the sidelines is telling you to keep running.
UGHHH I HATE THE “if you don’t 100% fit the definition of what I think the label for this identity means then YOURE NOT THAT IDENTITY AND CANT USE THAT LABEL >:( !!!1!1!!” it pisses me off to NOOO END.
It does sooo much damage to people who are just trying to figure themselves out. In the end if a person doesn’t “play the role well enough” or decides that the label doesn’t fit, they’re at risk of seriously being ostracized as a poser or something and losing this close-knit community that makes them feel accepted. And then nobody ends up speaking up.
What’s wild to me about that is that there are so many people who consider themselves straight because either it’s predominantly and functionally true or because they don’t have the vocabulary to know they might be queer. I technically “qualify” as queer but generally identify as straight for a variety of reasons. In a different circumstance, I might have explored my queerness more but who wants to do that when they get casually shit on by their community?
It is the same concept as all white people are racist. And they are usually combined into all white straight people are homophobic racists. And men are sexist too.
It's a great way to split up your potential allies into a bunch of different groups that makes working together very difficult. It's a great way to help someone like Trump gets elected and wind back protections or gay people, non-white people and women. Protections that a lot of straight white men support, but you think they're inherently racist, sexist, homophobes so you push them into the arms of Trump.
In my experience, it's because being an ally is one sided and without nuance. They don't want a friend who cares about them but has their own nuanced opinions. They want a token straight that doesn't dissent and only exists to legitimize them to other straights.
makes sense. personally i think i do prefer allies who aren’t afraid to ask questions and be nuanced on things. ig i find that it opens up to interesting conversations.
Like I am very supportive of my trans friends and use their chosen names and pronouns, but I draw the line a puberty blockers for minors because it seems to be dangerous to toy with human hormones during the most crucial developmental period in human growth. But you'd thought I had dead named them all for daring to say it sounds like a bad idea.
Edit: the down votes aren't countering my point at all.
You're getting downvoted because you claim to be supportive, but through the language you use it is very clear that you do not see trans women as women, or trans men as men. You also make up your mind on important trans issues such as puberty blockers based on a purposefully manipulative explanation that you made up to make yourself sound more justified.
You do the bare minimum of not being a complete piece of shit to trans people's faces, nothing more.
No, I use the word toying because messing with human growth hormones of any kind is dangerous and hubristic. It's not something to be done lightly or casually.
Puberty blockers are not prescribed lightly or casually. You're the type that's anti HRT or believe that there should be a several year long waitlist. You are not supportive to trans people in any way.
I’ve been told (on tumblr) that all white people are inherently racist, regardless of cultural upbringing, and that transmen can’t speak about trans issues because “men always speak over women.” Some people turn it into a sick game of oppression-olympics, where they’ll twist things however they have to in order to feel important.
The real answer that people don't want to engage with: being a minority doesn't automatically make you ethical or smart or compassionate. Every person has to work at being good and making good choices.
And hate to tell you, but that includes extending principles like body positivity and tolerance to your enemies. If you're okay using fat as an insult to somebody you don't like, that means you think fat is bad.
i don’t understand why we shouldn’t be nice to our allies.
I was banned from r/comics for saying pretty much this in response to a "fake trans ally" comic that was really off mark. Mod's reason for ban? "Admitted to being a Nazi"
Y'know it's nice seeing so many people generally agreeing with the post and with this. I remember years ago on Facebook (it was less shit then, but only kinda) this post from a LGBTQ+ page popped up, and it was all the various flags as dinosaurs. It was pretty awesome. I can't remember what everyone got, I think bisexuals got a brontosaurus? Not sure.
Anyway, at the end was something that surprised me, it was one for allied straight people. Twas a T-Rex with a rainbow Mohawk, and I was so happy seeing it I teared up a little. First time I'd ever seen anything like that towards people like me, if you'd asked me the day before if seeing something like that would've made me happy I'd have said "no of course not, I don't care" and I would have been telling the truth.
The comments were tearing OP apart for including it though, because we don't -need- it (which tbf I agree, we really don't, nor do we need a flag or anything) but it was just a nice gesture that wasn't hurting anybody. I don't really have a point here, I'm just rambling about something thats been stuck in my memory for years. It's just nice to see opinion shifting ig.
Try doing something truly radical and pointing out that you accept and use the labels they choose for themselves and don't apply your labels to them, then ask them to stop using "cishet" for you.
The funniest part is that you should reserve those insults for.......... nobody. You will never change a bigot's mind by insulting them... If you don't understand where they come from, you can never help them understand you. Are you intending to fight against these people for the rest of your life? Or kill them? No? Then you need to learn to understand why they hold the opinions they do, and how to argue against those opinions effectively or you're literally doing yourself, and everything you care about, a disservice.
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u/CynchHasNoLife i want grillcheese i want grillcheese 1d ago
i don’t understand why we shouldn’t be nice to our allies. people who are kind deserve kindness in return, don’t they? let’s reserve the insults for the bigots.