Progressivism - Tumblr Posts

I don’t want to make people mad with my existence, I don’t want to challenge right-wing ideals just being myself, I don’t want to counterculture or revolutionary, I just want to exist not having to know that a considerable amount of people want me dead and think of me as inherently sinful or dirty. I don’t want to have to wake up every day and realize people who hate me are all around me and I interact with them nearly every day.

The essence of right-wing authoritarianism is the idea that some people deserve what they get. This is deeply seeped into American culture; anywhere from the idea that disabled people became so from their own carelessness to the idea that it’s okay to laugh at people who died due to their own stupid decisions, aka the ‘natural selection’ jokes. People who are struggling in some way are so because of their own cluelessness or evil nature, and that means they deserve it, and that means we must turn a blind eye to their suffering, or if not, actively find joy in it…. this is a dominant idea in America.

What people call stupid American laws:

-It’s illegal to drive a camel on a road in Nevada 🤣

-Must be 18 to play pinball in South Carolina 😳

-It’s BANNED to sleep naked in Minnesota?? 😦

Real stupid American laws:

-There are no federal days off for voting

-Corporations are allowed to charge tons of money for life saving medicine such as insulin

-Disabled people can lose their being on disability because they got married

-Some people are denied life-saving abortions

It’s pretty obvious to me why right-wing extremism is so much more commonly violent than left-wing extremism, and it’s because their ideology is inherently violent… unlike left-wing ones. The problem is not simply the fact they’re extreme- extreme solutions are rational to extreme problems like we have now. The problem is the fact that they’re right-wing.

Conservatives putting their kids/threatening to homeschool their kids, instead of just teaching them what they think is correct in their own time- you know, like liberals do, is because they know their opinions wouldn’t stand up to scrutiny by any unbiased party. No one would choose homophobia because there is nothing logical about it. No one would believe their lies about history. No one would disagree with evolution, with the Civil War being about slavery, transgender existence unless they had an emotional tie to it. An alien coming to Earth exposed to all objective information would never choose to be conservative, and neither would a child. They know this, and they care more about their bubble being preserved than truth or compassion.

Famous psychology experiments will show clearly how teaching people blind obedience to authority and placing them in a society which emphasizes hierarchy in all aspects of life makes people let awful things happen to other people or just do awful things themselves, and the popular takeaway in public consciousness is ‘humanity is evil and we should just let global warming kill everyone and never try to fix any problems’

“Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities” is very true but especially harrowing when you consider just how much of the conservative worldview baseless absurdities make up. It’s become such a part of mainstream discourse that it’s so easy to forget that not only is rhetoric such as ‘gay people are groomers and dangerous around children’ and ‘there is widespread voter fraud committed by democrats and illegal immigrants’ false- it’s absurd. It’s based off absolutely no information and debunked by every actual research into the topic. And progressives of all stripes have to spend 80% of our time debunking this, instead of actually doing anything to solve actual problems.

Sanders is too important to do in a tweet

As liberals, we suffer a certain blindspot.  We imagine ourselves too insightful, too compassionate or perhaps just too clever to be taken in by nonsense.  Anti-gay legislation and dogmatic religious belief even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, we tell ourselves, is the province of the right.

Yet, here we are having a heated discussion about a woman who is a politician, warts and all, and a seemingly messianic figure.  We’re declaring him to be blessed by nature because a bird landed on his lectern, we’re claiming that his enemies- even when they’re political allies who merely disagree- are devils.

This is all window dressing.  This is politicians being politicians.

Let me take you back some years to a similar moment.  I was in college, I was freshly back from the service, and I made a good friend who I’ve kept up with since.  He’s a born again democrat, and I like to believe that our discussions in the dawn of that friendship helped him shed the last vestiges of a republican upbringing.

In that time, there was another older gentleman with sincere convictions and a swell of popular support among the youth vote.  He too claimed that there was a silver bullet, that all of the ills of society could be undone with a series of measures predicated on a centerpiece of legislation, a bedrock that would be the foundation for a new way of business that would serve us in the decades to come.

People listened to Ron Paul when he said “end the fed” because he was old enough that he sounded like the voice of experience, educated as a physician (an erudite degree but generally unrelated to governance) and because he had the charisma that only an old man set in his ways and dedicated to his beliefs can have.

Mind you, he was also a brazen homophobe and his son has carried his torch after him, but in these days young GOPers are less and less interested in the movement.  Libertarianism has generally been revealed as the position of the privileged and the well-off, it’s surge of popularity in the mid 2000s is well in the grave.  Plenty of other takedown pieces on Paul and his sermonizing exist elsewhere, but for my part, I wrote a discussion of my impressions of the rally I attended with my friend.  I have decided to un-retire my blog because- unbelievably- I now have a left facing critique of the same kind to write.

I’ve lost the link to it, but in short, don’t talk about the Roman Empire as reasons for why we should make one political decision or another in the United States and don’t pitch yourself as young at heart.  The first is just illogical coming from the right.  For people that keep saying that we need doctors and engineers to run the world, they sure do go scrambling for the classics when it comes time to talk politics.  They don’t seem to fact check with classicists either.  The second exposes how very concerned you are with the idea that young people will figure out that you’re not really one of them and begin to seriously consider what your angle is.

I thought to myself “only red voters.”

But here we are.

Sanders tells us that he has an easy way to solve all of society's ills.  I don’t even necessarily disagree with him.  Campaign finance reform is a great idea.  Tax code revision is a great idea too.  But if you seriously think that taking the money out of the government and the upper class is all it will take to put America back on track let me sit you down so we can have a discussion.

Seven years ago, another hitherto little-known senator challenged Clinton and beat her in a primary, and he too ran campaign ads and played the “Hillary is a jerk” narrative for all it was worth.  He didn’t have to work hard.  She was a woman, in the 90s, seeking to wield power for healthcare reform.  The GOP wrote the book on the “Hillary is a power-hungry bitch” narrative years before Obama used it in the left.  By that time, the story had taken on a life and a truth of its own, despite her lifetime of good works and all evidence to the contrary.

Trouble is, he then promptly appointed her to the very pinnacle of his administration's global presence.  The Secretary of State is not an office to appoint on a pity vote or for some paltry reason.  You put someone there you reckon as trustworthy and effective and able to produce results on the world stage.  It’s a big deal.

This should tell us all something really important: when Barack Obama was on the campaign trail talking about Hillary Clinton the same way that Sanders supporters talk about her, he too was playing the game.  He played it well but he still had the sense at the end of the day acknowledge her skills, talent and integrity.  In the end, the story that he sold us on that cost Hillary that primary was not the one he followed.  The truth of her he reserved for his cabinet picks.

We have a black president.  We live in a structurally racist country.  Do you believe that this is because Barack Obama, who has raised more money in his presidential career than any other candidate ever couldn’t collect the cash to position himself properly?  Do you think it’s because a black man who is the father of two daughters has no concern for these matters?

In his eight years, Obama has done an admirable job.  I know he pissed you off because guantanamo is still open and we’ve been spied on for years but seriously were you really all that surprised about that?

The black president couldn’t end racism.  Remember all those pictures of black women in Chicago praising the lord that the day had come?  Remember those pictures of hundreds of people rioting in Missouri seven years later?  You think it’s because he- a black man- misled them about wanting to improve life for black people?

So let’s take a step back and assess the powers of the presidency in sobriety for a moment.  Obama pulled off health care reform and busied himself with doing whatever measure- many of them rather right-leaning- in order to salvage a tanked economy.  He surprised the hell out of me with his gay marriage flip flop (thanks Joe, I know you forced his hand on that one).  Makes you think twice about whether or not you’re against flip flops.  It should at any rate.

So my first question for you is where you think that Sanders will fail you.  You cannot accurately answer that question, indeed you won’t even entertain it, if you’re a Sanders supporter.  Or you’ll acknowledge the possibility but wave it away with meaningless platitudes like “he’ll do his best.”

That’s little league thinking.  This is the majors.

You can get away with little league thinking when you’ve been getting by on firebrand dissents and populist legislation for years.  Veteran’s rights bills.  Pension assurances.  Vacation bills.  Resolutions to celebrate black history month.  Anti-corporate bonus legislation.  A history of noble and well aimed bills sponsored by Sanders.  I’m not attacking any part of this record on principle or idea.  It’s not bad work, but it’s not the record of a man who courts controversy seriously.

It’s not hard to pass a veteran’s rights bill in America.  In fact if you can’t do it in your first session I think you should be thrown out of congress for incompetence.  Not all of his bills passed, plenty of them were willing to challenge the monied order.  Plenty of them were radical.  If we examine Sanders record carefully, we can see a lot of bipartisan support for bills about agreeing that puppies are adorable and a lot of failed bills that say that the devil is evil.

His is the record of a man who does good where he can and does a protest bill to shout and throw a fit when he realizes that he hasn’t got the clout or consensus to fix an injustice that he sees.  Those bills, those senate outbursts, are not a mark of decency to me, they are a mark of exhaustion, of throwing up your hands and deciding you’re too tired to explain it to another republican jerk.  I think we can all relate.

He’s been in congress for three decades.  He has failed in that time to get his colleagues to agree with him on things like dismantling organisations deemed too big to fail, on getting them to acknowledge climate change when we had a chance to stop it.  If in 30 years he couldn’t build consensus enough to punish the banks that wrecked the 2008 economy or avoid sinking Miami, what makes you think the presidency will make him any more persuasive or compelling in those chambers?

“He’ll do what he can, he’ll always stick to his guns and do what’s right, even if he can’t accomplish anything” you say.

That’s privilege talking.  I keep getting this tripe coming to me from predominantly straight white men who have no stake in this.  If a republican comes to power in January, their marriages won’t have to be rushed or cancelled.  They won’t be deported or put into a camp for owning a Koran.  Police forces won’t invade their neighborhoods and violate their civil rights.  Their healthcare decisions will not be dictated to them by the state.

These are not paranoid anxieties.  We have put japanese in camps in this country.  We have legislated bills specifically forbidding gay freedom.  We have created a system that takes hundreds of thousands of american citizens and jails them for being born low.  If you think me paranoid when I express my concerns about what the right can do if set loose, I think you’re an idiot.

This election is not about getting shiny things that you want.  It is about protecting the tarnished-by-monied-politics but hard earned things that we have fought so hard for over the past seven years.  

This is the most radical, religiously insane, billionaire-owned republican nomination contest of all time.  I don’t care which democrat makes it into office or what shiny new healthcare reform we get, I care about the calamity that will fall upon me as a gay man and that will fall upon hundreds of thousands of women, muslims, immigrants and people of color if we should fail.

We will fail if we take this course.  

Bernie Sanders is not a dangerous candidate because I think he’s ingenuine or because I disagree with his policies in even the slightest regard.  He is a dangerous candidate because he has failed to reform socialism as a concept in american political discourse, because for all your talk of similarity to Obama he’s not mobilized voters of color and because at the end of the day you cannot tell people “I am not a communist” and follow that up with “we need a glorious revolution comrades!”

I can think of no better piece of soundbite fodder, no more early Christmas for GOP strategists than a headline like “SANDERS WINS, FIRST SOCIALIST PRESIDENT IN AMERICA.”

I’m not confused about what socialism is.  You’re confused about how hard it’s going to be to get people to understand what it is.

When 2010 came, and you were all disappointed because Obama had not shut down Guantanamo, we were buried under the weight of a red landslide of midterm elections that have crippled our government for 6 years.  

In our hubris, we condescendingly called the Tea Party a brief fad of the right that would pass once they saw that that brand of politics was a dead end headed towards a black hole.  Do you still think, after fucking our credit score for the first time ever, literally shutting down the government and at every turn disabling the basic functions of even day-to-day government that those psychos look at that abyss and say “hey we better chill out!”

And now you are those psychos.  “If Sanders doesn’t take the nomination I’ll vote independent or I’ll just not vote.”

You’ll tank progressivism if you don’t get your way.  You’ll get behind Ron Paul for Leftists.  You’ll buy into the now age-old argument that Hillary Clinton is a shill and a sellout and a liar.

You’ll do all these things and you ask me why I look at you like you’re a tea-partier?

a good chunk of internet leftism is just puritanical bullshit masquerading as woke and progressive which has thus developed into callout/cancel culture and respectability politics, encouraging a narrow, black and white worldview while discouraging critical thinking, creating insignificant and performative activism, and prioritizing discourse and public image over meaningful praxis

It's sort of weird to explain, but i feel like it is xenophobic of north americans to treat south americans terrible on the basis that we make "racist" jokes. Because it has become something of a cultural artifact down here, we make jokes about asian people and jewish people and so on :3 and it is a beautiful tradition that i feel gets me discriminated from even tolerant spaces. This feels especially hypocritical of north americans when taking into account how their governments have been the ones responsible for the most harm (by far) to other peoples! It looks like yet another branch of twisted western ideology seeping into every culture, and i will not let it happen >:3

United States, you may manage to take our land, our economic independence, our country, but you will never take our racist jokes >>>:3

Maoism-Third Worldism is based y'all, the revolutionary potential in all of these bad boys is simply, divine!

Our boy Mao was pretty much on the money, common Mao W.

But we gotta figure out how to get that Left Globalization thing going y'all...

It would be so funny if i were to create a group for far-right LGBT youth, and our beliefs are:

-Classical Fascism: did you know that Giovanni (father of fascism alongside Mussolini) was disgusted by racism? So are we :3

-Eco-Fascism: the environment is suffering y'all.

-Strasserism: the left-wing of nazism which believed Germany should have started a war against the USA, allied with Russia, socialized the means of production and focused entirely on the wellbeing of the proletariat, my cup of nazi tea :3

-National Anarchism: anti-imperialism and anti-capitalism! Turns out neoliberal globalization pissed off some puritanical people who don't like the state, so they ended up with pseudo-anarchist communes with a whole lot of racism :v

-Julius Evola: this goofy ahh fascist bro believed in the supremacy of the individual over the dogma of christianity and such, yet that while alone is weak, many together are strong!

-Friedrich Nietzsche: whilst inspiring so much nazi shit, this guy was very inspiring to differently-abled people such as myself :3 his concept of a self-determining individual who is bettered by rising above their unique challenges, although he didn't love women 3:

-Homofascism: :3 love it

Our whole purpose is honestly, not fascist at all, it's just religious socialism with extra steps! But hey, it will probably attract some sexy nazis that will feel horrified when they see our degeneracy on full display whilst we study Mein Kampf :3 love y'all, be safe followers :3

Society's current feelings on veganism were totally planned. It was an entire smear campaign for the sake of the meat and dairy industry. I mean, my generation grew up on milk being shoved down our throats constantly. "Got Milk?" The history on that is pretty neat. There's a documentary. Anyway, meat and dairy (some of the largest industries in the world) will do literally anything to prevent progressive norms. We quite literally have all the technology, money, time, manpower, and resources to produce lab-grown meat that's (in every way that matters) the exact same in texture and taste. And we wouldn't need to kill a single thing ever again. We could do it right now. We could be Star Trek right now if we wanted. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise.

i've recently realized i've been using veganism as a litmus test for how willing someone is to engage a niche ideology in good faith.

how many mental gymnastics and whataboutisms someone uses to shit on vegans is such a good indicator for how bad faith someone is going to be about literally anything they don't completely agree with

i'm not even vegan, i just think people are so fucking abnormal about veganism