ThisUsernameKillsFascists

What you are misunderstanding (possibly intentionally), is that each axis of power dynamics has more- and less-privileged positions: race, class, sex, gender, sexual orientation, physical dis/ability, mental dis/ability, etc. A fully able-bodied and mentally healthy rich, white, straight, cis man is obviously going to be more privileged than a paraplegic, poor, black, gay, trans woman with learning disabilities (but note that even this does not automatically translate into more happiness, better self-esteem, etc.). But if you try to compare the privilege of an upper-middle class, native-American, gay, cis woman born with only one hand vs. a poor, white, straight, cis, teenage boy with ADHD, it’s much thornier, and ultimately not an important comparison to make.

When people speak of white privilege, they are saying that a white person lives generally unencumbered by their race and how others perceive them because of it. They are, in aggregate, less likely to be pulled over or stopped by police. They are more likely to get job interviews, and to be seen as a good potential hire by those interviewing them.

For male privilege, it means being more likely to be seen as leadership material, less likelihood of being sexually assaulted, a probability of higher lifetime earnings, and less chance of having one’s ailments dismissed by doctors, or of being passed over for a promotion because you might someday get pregnant and need maternity leave.

Every axis of privilege is different, they are not particularly cross-comparable, and they are all just probabilities - none are deterministic. Some types of privilege are fairly inherent (class, health/ability), while others are based on how our society treats people differently based on group affiliation (race, sex, gender, sexuality). The point of identifying these is not to shame those who have privilege, but rather to recognize the various difficulties faced by those who are less privileged, so that we might mitigate those challenges. In a just world, everyone would be treated as though they were a member of the privileged group(s) along every axis, and judged only by their own actions.

That sounds like even more reason for the workers to organize

As their jobs keep getting devalued, by AI (whether appropriate or not), and they are increasingly treated as unskilled labor, there will be more pressure to organize in order to mitigate losses in pay and benefits.

Exactly this - if I don’t know you personally well enough to know that you “of course” would never support republicans, then I have no way to tell from which direction you are attacking the Dems.

Once we reached a point where it was no longer safe to assume that Nazi shit and overt racism, bigotry, etc. was sarcastic, we all had to stop assuming that anyone knew we were better than that. That’s also when /s tags became absolutely necessary again, even when saying some absolutely bonkers shit. I long for the days when I could safely assume that no one was that stupid, and that they would assume I wasn’t either.

And that is worse than big stuff changing in the wrong direction because…?

Voting is easy, it takes very little effort. Even just the pretense of them not being warlords and the modicum of protection that pretense provides is worth the negligible effort of voting. It doesn’t mean you should stop doing more effective things, but those things are not undermined by voting in the least.

Because it’s of course totally impossible for me to have a personal stake in the well being of trans people without being one myself, right. There’s no way there could be other people in my life already feeling the damage done by this administration…

I’m also a lifelong atheist, and very much opposed to religion playing any part in government affairs. If I refused to vote for any politician that invoked god on the campaign trail, I’d have never voted in 25+ years of adulthood. Regardless of what the issue is, refusing to vote for the better/less harmful candidate means prioritizing your own emotional self-satisfaction over the well being of those most directly affected (whether that includes you or not). It might feel good and righteous to take such a stand, but it’s a trap.

It would be mansplaining for me to try to tell you how to feel about these candidates, or about the experience of being betrayed by the “better” party - I’m not here to do that, nor would I have any right to. I’m saying that however you feel, you shouldn’t let your feelings determine your vote. That shitty candidate that cares more about getting elected than about your rights will never know why you didn’t vote for them (in fact they are likely to guess the opposite), and you’ll be stuck with the one who revels in causing you pain. Please don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the bad if the only other option is the downright monstrous.

I don’t believe that most politicians of either party actually give a fuck about women’s sports in general - they certainly never have before this issue came up. For cowardly democrats on the anti-trans side of the sports issue, they simply see this as a way to avoid appearing too “woke” to independents and conservative democrats, while only directly affecting the handful of mtf athletes among their constituents.

I fully agree that most trans folk and their loved ones would gladly cede the sports issue in exchange for some real protections - I certainly would.

I’m not saying that these anti-trans democrats are trustworthy; I’m saying they are motivated by poll numbers, not personal animosity. Losing won’t motivate them to do better unless they lose to someone with better values - that’s why we can teach them lessons in the primaries but not in the general election. If they lose in the general, the lesson they will take is that they weren’t conservative enough, so withholding your vote at that point is counter-productive.

The republicans want to pass bills that will make life overtly harder for trans folk, beyond sports and even bathroom use. The priority right now is to take away their majorities in the House and Senate, so that those bills can’t even be brought to the floor for a vote. Beyond that we have to hold them accountable during their term, and we can primary them next time around. There is no situation in which withholding votes from Democrats in the general results in better outcomes for trans people.

I’m cis myself, but that doesn’t mean I don’t have a very personal stake in this fight. I have yet to hear of a Democrat politician that thinks trans people should die - I wish I could say the same about republican politicians.

For trans people, I absolutely understand the fixation, because it is their lives at stake. But even if judging on just the one issue, and with no actual good choice on it, there are still degrees of badness, and one candidate is likely much more of a threat than the other in a given race.

Not for the greater good - for their own good. Even if you only care about one issue (and justifiably so), and both candidates are on the wrong side of that issue, it is likely that one of them is far worse on that issue than the other. It doesn’t have to feel good to vote for the someone who stands in opposition to your interests, but it is better than letting the person who stands in opposition to your existence win.

No issue is a strict binary - there are many degrees of transphobia, just as there are many degrees of any bigotry, as well as many degrees of non-human-rights issues, like support for public schools or privatization of health care. I would imagine that in almost every case where there is an anti-trans democrat running against an anti-trans republican, there is a significant difference both in terms of how rabidly transphobic the candidate is and which specific anti-trans policies they will support. There is also likely to be a big difference whether or not there is any potential for them to see the error of their ways. While most anti-trans democrats are likely on the wrong side of trans participation in sports, they are not likely to support criminalizing trans existence or encouraging violence against trans people, while many republicans are. They also will face pressure from pro-trans members of their own party, and from significant pro-trans constituencies, which republicans will not.

In FPTP voting systems, we rarely have the luxury of voting for candidates who have our full-throated support in the general election. Even if one issue is massively more important to you than the rest (and when that issue is a matter of survival, that is 100% valid), there is almost always a greater and lesser evil on that issue alone. Voting shouldn’t be viewed as a matter of identity or even as an endorsement, but rather as a practicality. It is a method of weighing in as to which of the limited options available is more tolerable (or less intolerable). Does that suck? Absolutely. Does it make sense to vote any other way within such a system? Not at all - because if the more tolerable side loses, the only lesson they are likely to take from that loss is to become more like the winning, intolerable side.

I understand what you are saying very well. I did not however, describe myself as an anarcho-Marxist, nor would I. I pretty clearly stated that there are aspects of liberalism, Marxism, and anarchism that I agree with. I don’t adopt any of those as my political identity, however, because each of those ideologies has problematic ideas, theorists, adherents, and histories.

A lot of socialism’s problematic histories stem precisely from revolutionaries in agrarian monarchies ignoring the fact that it is supposed to be a post-industrial, post-capitalist economic system. The lack of existing industry in those countries led to authoritarianism in an attempt to compete economically with capitalist nations, and in most cases that predictably led to fascism with a veneer of socialist/communist marketing.

Anarchism is an ideal - I don’t want to say it is unachievable, but humanity is currently far from ready for the level of vigilance it would take to maintain such a system, and I have no good ideas for how to get there from here. That doesn’t mean there aren’t things we can do within our current societies to push things in that direction culturally and economically, but I don’t think that overcoming the entrenched state powers directly is likely anytime soon. And since it has become clear in the last decade that much of the world doesn’t remember or never properly learned the political lessons of the 20th century, I think that the best we can hope for in the short term is a more peaceful world in which wealth inequality is shrinking rather than growing and human/civil rights are expanding.

Yeah, no. I am familiar with poststructuralism, and even read some Foucault a couple of decades back. I’m also well aware of its historical ties to relativity and (to a lesser extent) quantum physics, and that, similarly to how those discoveries ruptured ideas of objective reality in physics, poststructuralism did so for objective meaning and the primacy of authorship in literature, history, and other humanities.

Poststructuralism is very useful for understanding how fascism takes hold and the power of propaganda. It allows us to better understand how Western colonialists shaped ideas of race to enforce their own supremacy. What it does not do is demand that we all choose to obfuscate and intentionally distort perspectives to obtain our goals. I would actually argue that, on the contrary, one of the important lessons of poststructuralism is that we should focus on the factual if we want to address the world’s problems in a non-zero-sum manner - it is often our attempts to codify subjective meaning into false narratives of supposed truth that are the source of strife and anomie when a society (or humanity at large) is capable of materially supporting itself.

All of which is to say, in a thoroughly roundabout and unnecessarily academic way, that’s its fucking annoying when you put words in people’s mouths and make assumptions about their beliefs based on things they didn’t even say. Please learn to take simple statements at face value, and don’t assume that everything is said for the purpose of trying to shape people’s understanding of the world. A prediction is not the same as an endorsement, and an acknowledgement of factual events is not a value judgement as to whether that reality is desireable or not.

Your insistence that language can only be prescriptive and never descriptive is honestly offensive in its anti-intellectualism and dismissal of the importance of truth and accuracy. We can’t solve problems which we can’t accurately assess, and we can’t stop the actual ecofascists without acknowledging that they are the ones who hold power in most of the world. Their narrative is unfortunately the future that is most likely to come to pass because they are in the position to ensure that it does, not because those of us who would like to see them stopped recognize the difficulty of doing so.

Your main argument seems to be that we shouldn’t ever try to make value-neutral, factually-based assessments of probabilities, and instead we should only propagandize. This is literally the exact mistake China made in the cultural revolution of the 1960s. Doing so lost them a generation of scientists who either fled or were killed for insisting that truth and accuracy were more important than narrative. It is ultimately no different than Trump banning certain news organizations from White House press events because he doesn’t feel like they portray him positively often enough. This is magical thinking, end it doesn’t end well regardless of where you stand on the political spectra.

Speaking of which, you throw around the term “liberal” like a 20 year old that decided to skip Das Kapital and go straight to the writings of cold-war tankie academics that can’t see the forest for the trees. In the most classical sense, I am a liberal simply because I am anti-authoritarian, pro-democracy, and pro-science. But at the same time, I am a Marxist who believes that the means of production should belong to the workers (not the state), and an Anarchist who dislikes the coercive nature of social hierarchy. All of those positions are born out of the understanding that truth is more important than narrative, and honest analysis is fundamental to solving problems. Persuasion, if deceptive, is always a hindrance, and the need to change facts to better prop up an ideology is the very foundation of fascism. In chastising us for not focusing on your preferred narratives, you embody that which you claim to oppose.

Quoting yourself and bolding the few phrases you used to acknowledge that Simulation6 might not be a moustache-twirling, colonial techno-fascist does not adequately offset the aggressiveness and assumption of ill-intent that pervades your comments.

You also seem to be much more interested in what you have to say than in the actual content of the comments you respond to. For example, I did not say anything about criticizing ecofascist narratives being a denial of climate change, and I don’t even see how what I wrote could be read as such. I pointed out that though the public has been aware of climate change for half a century, in that time we have not only collectively failed to reverse its course, we have only continued to accelerate the process. Factual acceptance of that reality is not equivalent to moral acceptance of climate change, its causes, or its effects.

You seem to really want both Simulation6 and myself to be colonialist liberals unwilling to look for non-tech solutions to problems (presumably because that is the argument you were prepared to have), but neither of us has said anything to indicate that that is the case. I don’t want to speak for Simulation6, but I saw nothing in their comments beyond an entirely justified cynicism that short- and medium-term material difficulties will most likely adversely effect primarily those who are least able to weather such problems. That, and apparent bewilderment as to adswhy they were seemingly being attacked by you for things they did not say.

You clearly took their prediction of the likely outcome (given the world we do live in and the obviously shitty priorities of the powers that be) as an endorsement or acceptance of that outcome, when they did not say anything to indicate that they found it at all acceptable. While your overall points about the options that we as humans have are valid, your positioning of this poster’s values in opposition to your own is baseless and unwarranted. Pessimism about humanity’s ability to successfully mitigate or overcome the problems of our own making is not the same as saying we shouldn’t try. For example, even the most ardent advocates of ending fossil fuel usage understand that in the past 50 years we have done far more to exacerbate climate change than to mitigate its effects, let alone reverse the damage already done. Predicting the most likely outcome of a situation is not at all the same as saying that nothing better than that outcome is possible.

“Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”

I did a studio session with them about 20 years ago, when they were still pretty popular and before they were widely considered to be a joke, but I was not a fan. When the studio I was working for called me to do the session, my wife said, “Watch - they will end up being really nice guys and you will end up liking them more because of it.” In reality, they were arrogant dickheads, and I hated them all the more ever since.

Dorms, cafeteria food, and minimum wage are not things that most Americans would want. It would really only be a benefit to those already making minimum wage (or unemployed) and without families. For the rest those would be motives for corruption, rather than the opposite.