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I agree. Trying to fix the conservative voting bloc from the ground up isn’t going to work. We’re boxing puppets, wondering why they won’t go down, when we’re ignoring the strings holding them up. You can’t honestly question them on their positions because their positions, when regurgitated, are often barely digested at all.
They are just handed the rules of engagement from up top.
And “up top” is all billionaires.
Bridging gaps, forming strong alliances and communities, starting movements, and organizing with like-minded people for change and mutual benefit is how acceptance becomes broader and is the catalyst for culture wars to fizzle out. These actions are the spark that allow people to broadly start to realize there is nothing to be afraid about. A person who is perceivably different or a minority existing, having rights, and thriving doesn’t harm anyone or have to be at anybody’s expense.
Our politicians and governments no longer represent us and the laws aren’t moving in the right direction any time soon. Fighting unjust laws and restrictions and winning politicians over is typically what you’d do as a minority to have your existence be legalized and protected, but I’d argue that we are past the point of no return - laws, reform, and protections aren’t going to come quick enough and we need to act urgently.
The more we polarize ourselves against others for holding less than tolerant views and sitting in judgement of them, the harder it is for us to focus on joining hands, organizing, and focusing on solutions and the change we’d like to see (and be). I’m not saying that we should put up with violations of our personal sovereignty, consent to being restricted unjustly by the law, consent to being subject to abuse (physical, verbal, or any other form), or enable or platform these behaviors.
Win the battles you can win - that means focusing on solutions with people that are actually on the side of all of humanity (which includes all people and minorities). The planet and all life on it is at stake.
I feel it’s ideal to be generally kind to others to hope for kindness back. Some might say that bigoted and hateful people don’t deserve kindness and I’d wholeheartedly agree - you don’t owe them anything and it’s not your job to force their heart open. But I feel it’s important to listen to our hearts and act on them - kindness has immense potential to soften hearts and dissolve boundaries - hate often has the opposite effect.
For example, do you let a person with conservative views who is intolerant, ignorant, and hateful stand in your way and eat your attention and precious life - or do you join hands with others in mutual support for progress and forward movement in our societies?
We can be an unstoppable force by moving out of the direction of the immovable objects and going beyond.
Wish I could focus on the class war, but as a trans person I’m kinda the focus of the culture war and have to be on the defensive.
All war is class war. Skip the middleman. Culture war shit is class war. Divide and conquer tactic.
As someone new here, and not on the left, this is the most interesting/healthy discussion I’ve seen on Lemmy so far. Thanks!
Culture wars that are especially distracting and polarizing are:
- Boomer vs Millennial - there are good and bad people in every generation. The ultra wealthy assholes suck in each.
- City vs Rural
- Religious vs Non-religious (including in this are the LGBTQ+ communities, planned parenthood, feminism, etc.)
- Racism disguised as immigration issues.
Yeah the generation war idea needs to die when you have Genx, millennials and genz billionaires all attending the commemoration party of the boomer who won the presidency. And the house itself stretches across all generations of assholes. You got leavitt, Johnson, Vance, Elon, Donald doing gross things daily. Every generation is represented here being capable and willing to be full on assholes.
Male vs. female
GenX: “We voted for the same assholes as the Boomers. Forgotten generation ftw”
j/k
but seriously, GenX really is forgotten in the culture wars too
I don’t think that’s a bad thing. Everyone should be forgotten in the culture wars and we should focus on the class wars.
Yeah I just thought it was funny lol
So lets just pretend other forms of discriminations don’t exist ? or what exsctly, is your goal here?
Focussing on those is a distraction, that you can engage in, if it makes you feel better (and maybe you’ll reach minor improvements for some discriminated group), but once you realize that capitalism is the problem, you’ll realize that solving that problem would also remove all other forms of discrimination that were brought to us by capitalists to divide us.
to your last sentence. Yes capitalist use bigotry to divide the working class and distract from the actual solutions to the massive inequality of capitalism.
I agree with that point My other commemt mostly refers to opressive hierarchies being older -for example patriarchy.
No it would not. Yes capitalism must go so do the colonial structures where it originated from. And yes current forms of discrimination interact with capitalism and our current systems and societies. How ever systems of oppression are far older than capitalism and it is at least my goal as of many other leftist mostly anarchists to have a society where hirarchies of opression don’t exist.
It is my observation which is not representative obviously, that people who advocate to soley focus on class, who usually ignore the struggles of opressed groups in our society, often hold bigoted views about at least some minorities.
As in your case against people with mental illnesses autism etc.
Back to the previous point.
To just focus on class completly ignores the struggles and the contributions of movemtents that fougth and still figth for the liberation of oppressed groups. like black liberation and queer liberation. just as an example. These things are not distractions. Not only has there been social progress which bettered the lives of people, although that progress has always been a compromise.
In fact your are not going to get a true liberation from capitalism without overcoming colonialism which has also intersections with hetero-cis-allo-endo normative patriarchy, and those are also linket to capitalism. I could list more structures of opression.
Dismanteling capitalism wont solve all problems. It is however an important step towards a liberated world if the systems that follow it are better.
in my experience this is said to absolve authoritarian leftists of needing to defend minorities and queer people, like don’t worry guys, we’ll ‘take care’ of you AFTER the revolution
Those ants out number us 100 to 1 and if they ever figure that out our way of life will end.
<Insert Kent Brockman meme here>
People (on the left) say this a lot, but I have yet to meet or even hear of someone willing to ignore their respective end of the “fight against woke”/advocating for minorities to make allies with their opponents on that issue to fight against the bourgeoisie.
When’s the last time you stepped in to defend someone spewing racial slurs to remind everyone the real enemy is capitalism, not racism?
No one should defend anyone spewing slurs. Regardless of economic orientation. But guess who supports people existing regardless of their politics, and who uses certain people existing as a political weapon.
It isn’t that the left doesn’t follow the meme. It’s that you don’t understand it on a basic level. If anyone scapegoats and use slurs against vulnerable groups fuck you. But we still support your access to healthcare, and the ability for you to meet a fulfilling standard of living. Same as everyone else. That doesn’t mean anyone has to tolerate slurs or personal attacks.
Then are we not opponents of the (far-)right in this “culture war?” Is that not what it is?
Feel free to explain instead of declaring that the problem is that I don’t understand and then fucking off like doing that helped me understand.
Only if we choose to be. Only if we adopt their language. Only if we accept their premise. Which is exactly what they want and exactly how they win.
Trans people are just people. What’s in their pants truly doesn’t matter. Conservative accusations don’t need defending against. That’s reactionary. They need to be actively attacked as projections of their own ignorance, stupidity, and horrible nature.
There is nothing valid in their claims to warrant needing to defend against them. In children pre puberty, there’s no real valid reason to separate the sexes at all. Post puberty, if they’re on hormone blockers they’re they’re the ones at a disadvantage if they choose to compete in sports. Bit it’s their choice. They’re also not any more likely to assault or victimize others more than any other group. That a conservative claims the only reason for someone to be trans is to exploit women, isn’t because trans people have ever been shown to be exploitative. Not like conservatives have.
All people need to be defended from conservatives. And we should never even humor their claims on ANYTHING. Every accusation is an acknowledgment and confession of the ignorance and hate in a conservatives heart. And they should be given no more deference or respect than any other unrepentant DARVO.
You just described how you’re fully committed to fighting back against their culture war attack, rendering your entire point, and that of this comic, moot.
By literally not engaging in the culture war. Again somehow you consistently fail to understand. There is nothing of substance that black people, urban people, immigrants, gays, trans, insert any of the minority groups you can think of. Need to defend.
Even assuming a defensive posture you’ve already given a darvo what they want. The only proper response to someone who victimizes others is not defense, but attack. If you wait till you have to defend a darvo’s victim. You’ve already failed the victim.
If they make claims against any group. The immediate first thing to do is not to defend the group. But ask them if they are a member of said group and speaking for them. If not then they need to shut the fuck up. Next ask them how many of said group they’re attacking they personally know. And of said group that they personally know how many are guilty of what they claim. And when they say they don’t know any of them to know any personally that are guilty. Again you tell them to shut the fuck up. Finally, when you ask them to give you any correlative evidence of any of their claims. And they can’t give you Jack shit. You tell them forcefully, loudly, and repeatedly. To shut, the everloving, fuck, up. Those attacks right there. Are all the defense anyone needs against dishonest victim blaming conservatives.Throwing their own baseless attacks back at them puts them on the defensive. Which is where they should always be.
Fictional nature of your hypothetical bravery aside, your comment is dripping with irony in that you are so balls to the wall in your participation in the culture war that you are attacking an ally, but somehow you consistently fail to understand that.
And your continued inability to engage honestly is far more ironic and damning. Better luck with your sealioning friend.
Defending someone spewing racial slurs is in fact participating in the culture war
So what’s the guy in the comic doing? Ignoring bigots and people who shame them?
Where did you come up with that?
Couldn’t think of a concrete example of someone center or left passing up the culture war for the class war, so I asked for one.
Why didn’t you give one?
That’s because taking a side in the culture war, tactically or otherwise, accepts it as a legitimate fight rather than what it is - a bourgeoisie distraction meant to atomize/divide the working class.
The correct course of action is not to participate but to reframe it in materialist sense. Racism/sexism/transphobia are not some spontaneous personal moral failings but historical tools of capitalist social control used to split workers, super-exploit marginalized groups for increased profit, enforce traditional family structures to secure birthrates for future workers to be exploited.
However, given how mass media constantly reinforces the culture war through the narratives and repetition, how emotionally driven it is by design and how anti-capitalist left that recognizes this fact is but a small minority means you’ll hardly see this kind of analysis in the wild.
There’s a reason ML orthodoxy is a completely marginalized ideal which is purely the realm of overconfident online edge lords who believe they understand contemporary leftist theory better than they actually do. It’s because the movement has no interest in actually convincing anyone outside their tiny ideological bubble, and instead substitutes thinly veiled threats about how there will be no need for convincing, should they ever miraculously obtain power somehow.
Where I live, it’s quite multicultural so I’ve felt the need to address racism less but I know I’ve spoken up in cases of sexism. I even lost my job over that (among a list of other issues I brought up).
The greatest challenge for me in redirecting hate towards the people who deserve it, such as people who hoard wealth as a way to control other people, is speaking in a way that as many people can understand. To me this means trying to be as simple and descriptive as possible. This not only helps me to be understood by a larger portion of people, but also makes it harder for angry people to defend their awful views.
Avoiding trending words has been very important in my attempts. All these new words and labels seemed to be used to hide the fact that these angry people don’t actually know what they believe in. Often they will also change topics rapidly. Combining a list of the latest words or labels and too many topics, that can be used to overwhelm their opponent. I say opponent because they don’t have conversations, just uninformed debates.
Staying on point and continuing to be clear and simple in my message is exhausting though. I once made a guy shit talking women and trans people disappear for a month in shame after calling him out. That came at a cost of my own mental stability for a while afterwards. I did make it very clear that I didn’t want him gone, just for him to stop with the hate filled attitude.
I still doubt how effective this is but at least I can find some joy in making these angry souls squirm as I plainly describe their actions and awful views.
It’s still so exhausting. It really feels like some people depend on the thought of a god in a machine to come save them. Even if that god says he will take everyones freedom and wealth to only save himself. They simply believe they are right because they tell themselves they are right. That seems to be all the justification they need.
I don’t know how a person can counter that way of thinking with out dedicating large amounts of time to deprogramming and teaching all these angry individuals. I also don’t have the resources
manipulatorsmarketing has to spread a more positive message. And neither do any of my friends, family or like minded people.
If there is a classless society, will beautiful people be at an advantage?
I would think so. In other words, there will always be at least two classes.
Who cares, as long as they’re not disproportionately represented, which is exactly what’s happening with the current class system.
Sure, but there’s a difference between being at an advantage and being the politically dominant class. The crucial thing about the working class owning class divide is that the owning class essentially has all the political power, and uses it to subjugate the working class. So what you’re saying is a truism, but it misses the point that the interesting thing isn’t the classes themselves but rather the power relations between them.
Why? Are cultural topics not what people vote on?
They shouldn’t be. But it is what many have substituted in place of being informed on the issues.
They shouldn’t but, they do.
So I guess my question is, how does this rhetoric push liberals/conservatives left?
Forcing someone to do something against their will, only makes them resent it more generally. There is no way to actually push anyone left. You can only lead them there. And only by example. It will always be their choice to follow or not.
For as much as the left likes to lament that Democrats could win if they just embraced the left. The left has never shown that. Which is silly considering how much everyone hates both regular options generally. A group running to support their communities in local office and not some “party”. Would seem a really popular in the face of it.
I disagree, I think people can be pushed leftward. I do think they can be lead there but, that includes cultural topics of discussion. It would be nice if the person persuading is an example but, I disagree with it being only by example.
I agree, it will always be their choice but, I think that ignores the meme. The left would have to persuade people with rhetoric. Those people would then be more inclined to vote for a leftist candidate.
I believe not talking about culture war topics denies the use of that rhetorical tool.
The left has never shown that.
They have indeed, which is why the Democrats now rig their primaries and have argued in court publicly that it’s their right to do so. The problem here is Democratic corruption is valued more than leftward movement. It was the leftist wing of the party that got Obama nominated and ruined the first crowning of Hillary Clinton too, before they opted to start rigging primaries. (Granted, they were sold a rotten bill of goods.)
How else was Harris going to be a candidate if it wasn’t rigged?
Further, I’d say take a look at Missouri, which went red while voting for state constitutional amendments that further the Bernie platform: $15 minimum wage, required paid sick leave, and repealing an abortion ban.
You are a perfect example.
This is exactly how delusional so many are. That you seriously imply that the 2024 election was some Machiavellian scheme to force Harris on everyone. Instead of ineptitude and failure on every front by the Democrats.
Even more absurd for the fact that you didn’t name the so-called leftist threat that a ringer like Harris was brought in to defeat lol. Not that you could. 90% of the people didn’t even know the name of anyone who ran in the few little primary races that they had before biden said that he was staying in.
It’s not at all unusual for the party not too primary the incumbent officer if they desire to run again. And while this situation was slightly unprecedented. It is not at all that unreasonable or unusual to consider the vice president as the successor. Again still total incompetent on the Democrats part. But not some Globe spanning conspiracy.
Actually if you object to me turning every conversation into a Brave Conversation about my pet issue you’re literally a Nazi and it’s your fault (not mine, never mine) that Donald Trump won.
so we’re done with defending trans rights?
defense is different than waging war
The culture war is the most inane bullshit and it’s designed to weaken the left. Protesting for Palestine to fight racism is useless while capitalism still exists. Same with trans rights and the environment. We need to focus all our resources on socialist revolution. Wasting time fighting racism and transphobia will just weaken us. I have a strong suspicion that the CIA has been stoking the pro-palestine movement to distract the left.
I have a strong suspicion that the CIA has been stoking you to divide the left. The fact that you consider fighting racism and transphobia “wasting time” shows that you are incapable of building the solidarity that would be required for a socialist revolution to succeed.
You can’t effectively address those who are transphobic and racist by fighting them, shaming them, and being hateful towards them. Bigotry and hate are fueled by a lack of understanding, acceptance, sometimes by a sense of superiority, fear, tribalism, religion, propaganda, incoherence and disconnection, confusion, and of course also by hate.
Adding to a cycle doesn’t break it, we need to move past these cycles of hate and hurt by joining hands with those who are on the side of all of humanity.
The people living in hate and fear who have dug their feet deep into the ground, blocking progress or even regressing it, standing with their closed hearts will catch up eventually.
I’m sure this position had nothing to do with your rampant abelism…
Narcissists are subhuman filth, and I’m not sorry for saying what we’re all thinking.
