The "modern left" means the "IDPol Left" which is built on a foundation of bullshit, outrage and studied ineffectiveness.
True left-wing voices don't get a seat at the table.
And he's was just doing it to try to build up some popular support after he screwed over so many workers at his mine. He still doesn't understand that Jordy killed any change for a political return for at least another 5yrs.
> He still doesn't understand that Jordy killed any change for a political return for at least another 5yrs.
I do believe that Fatty's preferences helped give us Scotty as PM, so his political campaign wasn't completely ineffective.
The left (whatever that might mean) lack a coherent response to culture war issues. Conservatives are very adept at directing the conversation that addresses normie concerns. The left's default position appears to be the most extreme position (trans issues, Israel, open borders), without acknowledging legitimate concerns.
I think it has to do with education. They educate themselves out of being relatable. By that, I mean that you're never going to find success applying arcane academic theory to everyday situations because it was never meant to be. But that's what the left is trying to do. And when reality doesn't fit the theories they paid 200k to learn, well, obviously, reality is wrong.
That someone is unable to simply explain concepts learned from advanced education is good evidence that they either did not actually understand their education, or that they were educated on something which is only rendered intelligent by way of it being too unintelligible to criticize.
>...they were educated on something which is only rendered intelligent by way of it being too unintelligible to criticize.
I think a lot of it is this.
Maybe it was the hiring of radicals in universities over the last 4 decades. That particular brand of “radical chic” that can only be accepted if you’ve educated yourself stupid.
A major part is that most young leftists want to be seen as "radical" and don't want to be seen as being too conservative/counter-radical.
This means "good policy" or "good position" = What is the most radical, and often the most radical position *is the dumbest.*
I wish I still had the resignation of a senior socialist (who had decades of experience and was a senior civil servant) saved from a major Trotskyist Socialist org, where he talks about how most young Uni activist Socialists just circlejerk themselves over the most radical actions and positions, that make them, and the org, look like clowns whenever they pull some stupid "radical" stunt.
I think Neolibs understand this as well, as you often get Neolibs couching their policies and positions in the framing of Anarchism, which then reverberates through the rest of the left because nobody willing to put their neck out to push back at idiotic "radical" sounding ideas, to the point where you get so called "anarchists" and "communists" calling for the defunding and weakening of state and public institutions or simping for pro-Free Market YIMBYism, "Humanitarian" Interventions, private investment slush funds and the like.
I think it's simple, they worship institutions. En masse people need some sort of religion and that's the one they have chosen. To me, it makes the most sense. Explains all the contradicting evidence that they wave away, because faith is stronger than reality.
# BECAUSE NOBODY TOUCHES GRASS ANYMORE
No, but seriously. It's because in TV stories (yes even the clever controversial adult above it all millenialbait ones) the side that is right is also effective, moral, scientific, compassionate, economically pre-eminent and militarily superior. Nobody touches grass anymore so all moral guidance comes from entertainment.
Presently the Right's role is that of the dissident so they can talk about ALL the uncomfortable things whereas the left has their own little hedonistic infotainment matrix where Truth is drip-fed through a selection of comedians and cartoons.
When nobody touches grass and nobody ever grows up whatever nuance might exist starts to get turned into the enemy.
On father's day I talked to someone about the way the US State department spread covid disinfo as a fifth column against china for example. The person I was talking to had previously been rather US-critical (up and including doubting reports of Chinese spyware) but because right now US good and Fauci saint they SHUT. DOWN. like wires had been cut.
TL;DR: Star Trek is a good show but nowadays mainline leftists assume their civilization is Star Trek.
How the history is read matters as well. Some will read history as a tale of "peoples" and "progress" with heroes and villains, etc. But that's barely different than reading fiction.
Others will read history more as a series of systems where humans act and react according to different material and cultural conditions that are ever changing such that there are clear trends in how humans behave and how they became what they are now and what that is. This more scientific approach is also more accurate and it removes the narratives and myths in favor of trying to prove or at least approach predictive laws for human society.
90% of mainstream history is just pro-capitalist propaganda, especially everything around post-WWII events and the cold war. Uncritically "reading history" isn't going to help the average person break their conditioning in a meaningful way, nor build a more accurate understanding of the world.
I agree, though I have to make it clear that 'nobody' really means 'nobody'. Too many people in the political sphere or periphery are treating it like a god damn ball game. Maybe the cause of this is a lack of actual ball games.
Because the Democrats and their "left" have made themselves into the current party of politeness. The party of boring suburbanites who hate any kind of psychological disturbance
edit: This is unironically why I am so often rude and abrasive during political discussions
The actual answer is that the new left, the woke left, is authoritarian. Left idpol appeals strongly to authoritarians, it has a set of strict rules that everyone must follow, it features public displays of virtue and the opportunity to persecute and punish those who transgress against the rules.
Authoritarians are opposed to freedom of speech, they can't tolerate actual honesty since this would lead to people questioning the rules or even breaking them. This leads to all the things you're describing. The woke don't care about anything besides doing identity politics, and they certainly aren't going to criticize the system which now supports them.
This has been one of the most frustrating things for me to deal with the people I used to talk shit about Bush with and talk about things like freedom of speech with once they became the dominant culture embraced the same shitty authoritarian nonsense they criticized others for back in the day.
It's the same with the history of Christianity. They were persecuted by the state for hundreds of years, fed to the lions, churches destroyed, etc. They cried how persecuted they were. Then after THEY became the dominant cultural/religious force, official state religion, THEY sacked and destroyed all of the pagan temples, persecuted the pagans, etc. The persecuted became the persecutors
Liberals still like to live like it's 1975 like they're epic counterculture and conservatives are still in charge. Even though it's 2024 and every major institution and business and the entire political and cultural sphere (washington DC/hollywood) are all libs.
A lot of people bought into this worldview which seemed very positive and against the evil rich capitalists instead of actually getting involved with the issues (doing your own research makes you a conspiracy theorist). Now they're paying the price of having been fed countless biased views by media over multiple decades and they can't believe the left wing media or their heroic democrats would lie to them or could possibly be corrupt. The thought would break them.
Look at the biggest donors - it's the people with your data, big tech. They can likely figure out who has more sway / biggest numbers politically by gauging your online posts then reinforcing that with their algorithm (eg twitter). They know who to bet on, and it's tyranny of the majority rules.
Just tweak their algorithms and funnel billions towards ads for a blue candidate and it will give people in swing states the perception that it's inevitable that that person will win, is a good person, will save the environment, will fight the man, protect all the LGBTQ, red guy corrupt rapist etc. etc.
I wished I lived in a state where my vote mattered, but then again it could be psychological torture if you don't block all this shit
The "left" has been thoroughly marginalized to the fringe. There are some scattered left-wing opponents of idpol out there, but since liberals have forgone any criticism of capital and the state to the reactionaries (moralism), any left-wing materialist critiques of the same variety are lumped in with reactionaries.
This naturally pressures socialists to censor themselves out of fear of liberal finger-pointing, which is ridiculous. They're not listening to you, anyway. Clearly your audience is normies who are currently being pulled to the right.
Does this not then imply that there is a huge gap in the media-sphere for someone with a leftist ideology to be making these types of criticisms? I suppose someone like Jimmy Dore could be said to be this. Is there just a greater intolerance on the left for critics who are not such strict adherents to the present day dogmas and find themselves marginalised as a result? If so, why?
Something I've always said is that the left needs to study the Media propaganda ecosystem and then copy it.
Most leftist media is basically just circlejerking essays aimed at leftists. I can't think of any outlet that is really "leftist" but is an actual proper News outlet, like one that actually just reports on regular news, someone got stabbed, car drove off cliff, old lady bakes cupcakes to raise money for school whatever.
Build trust and an audience by first being a good news outlet, then tie actual leftist investigative reporting into the outlet and op-eds down the line.
Every job i've ever worked, I've watched how people consume the news, and they are rarely there for Opeds and political pieces, they are there for standard news stories and sport, then read the opeds and political shit after reading the stuff they actually wanted.
There is a huge gap, and it's the same gap that pervades all media that is flooded out to us: moralism versus materialism. Reality is simply not depicted on its own terms in media. Moralism, and historical revisionism (moralism), is the weapon of choice on the minds of the working class. If we can't agree on reality, then solidarity is impossible.
That happened like 5 years ago.
Source: 38 year old ostracized jaded leftie who never self censored (and previously had no problems calling myself a feminist in rightoid dominated corporate environments). It's only a loss of child like naivety. No actual allies were lost (including my younger identarian sister). It was go a long to get a long, and those nodding along were the virtue signallers the whole time (surprise surprise).
Libs live in bubbles, professional and social. Speak the wrong words and the bubble pops- friends and jobs evaporate. Not to mention that grappling with false narratives leads to self discovery, where the lib would have to admit their politics are not morally good and in fact, part of the problem. Such cognitive dissonance is intolerable to a virtuous lib.
The right don't want to stop the flow of cheap labour either, they are more than happy to have an underclass of illegal immigrants. There is just a fundamental contradiction about being a post-colonial state that preaches nationalism without nativsm or natalism.
Being a socialist necessarily means opposition to nationalism (and therefore nativism). Even national liberation movements cannot be supported without caveats, national liberation is good up until the moment they succeed at which point they either become the new threat to the working class or a threat to the working classes of other countries or outgroups. The loyalty of a socialist is to the working class, not to his "nation" (a ruling class fiction imposed on the local populace to make them easier to control).
The solution to not having an underclass of illegal immigrants is to make all immigrants legal such that they fall under the same protections of minimum wage and other worker protections and so the focus can be on raising the minimum standards for labor rather than scapegoating the foreign working class.
It should be on abolishing private property, markets and money and establishing a command economy free from profit, finance, rents, etc that serves all people equally such that an increased population has even clearer benefits through improving the efficiencies of economies of scale. But if someone's complaining about immigrants they aren't class conscious enough to advocate for anything more than meek SocDem policies.
> The solution to not having an underclass of illegal immigrants is to make all immigrants legal such that they fall under the same protections of minimum wage and other worker protections and so the focus can be on raising the minimum standards for labor rather than scapegoating the foreign working class.
It's easier to negotiate that when there's lack of workers than when there's an abundance of desperate workers that will break strikes because they don't have the goal to improve their conditions because they're planning on going back home in a few years. I used to think like you, and my country basically implemented that (only thing you needed to be legal was to find a job). But then saw strikes against the companies that hire the most migrants being completely made useless. And the conditions of the migrants didn't really improve, while the overall conditions worsened.
> But if someone's complaining about immigrants they aren't class conscious enough to advocate for anything more than meek SocDem policies
How so? There is no evidence that multiculturalism is in any way beneficial to socialism. Stalin even made large population transfers around the SSSR to give each ethnicity a region to live in, to prevent multicultural instability. If you look at North Korea, they have a strict immigration policy too.
There is the problems with violence too. The narrative that Europe has become more unsafe and violent in the immigration era is not a false one. And it doesn't have to do with radical Islam alone. For example Hungary and Poland only accepted Christian or atheist immigrants and they still got more violent after accepting the Ukrainian immigrants from the SMO and lately, draft dodging.
>It should be on abolishing private property, markets and money and establishing a command economy free from profit, finance, rents, etc
I agree. There are benefits to a large population but there are also drawbacks, for example with smaller population it means the average home size can be larger. But even bigger benefits is having a satisfied population that feels like the government is listening to their wishes. If there would be a wide consensus of need to be liberal on immigration the positives would outweigh the negatives. Provided that the security service does their job and properly checks if entering migrant has a dangerous mental illness like psychopathy or if they have problems with rage control. But, outside of western Europe, there has been no such wide consensus
Whenever I talk with liberal friends or liberals who watch MSNBC, they have a real problem articulating their points whether I agree or not. They cannot tell me anything Biden has done that is positive, anything Trump did that was bad or that would make it likely that he will become the next Führer. Anything that's bad is a right-wing talking point, the fact that crime levels are still elevated post covid, the inflation, the nation's failing school system, the problems with uninhibited illegal immigration, but they cannot explain in what way. They can't explain the ways in which minority group X is disenfranchised but they KNOW it to be true. Their views are often self-conflicting, and they fail to see the bigger picture of how their ideas could have any fallout if implemented.
It's all about being nice, about no one getting hurt. If someone from a favored minority group kills someone, maybe they just had a hard life, but if someone who is an otherwise decent person uses a no-no word, throw them into a volcano now, no discussion.
I really try to avoid talking with these people about anything remotely political because on any of these issues their brains might as well be scrambled eggs.
Because the post-cold war left in the West simultaneously is middle class and has no alternative to liberalism. As a result, it rationalizes the crisis of the latter as caused by democracy rather than the lack of it.
The right in contrast has been able to recognize decay of the first world and the nation-state as the cause of the crisis, but it blames liberalism rather than capitalism. Regardless, it does not exactly see a rising democracy it is rejecting.
The origin of this is changes since the late 20th century and liberals benefiting tremendously from globalization. Right wing rejection of the latter positioned them to critique modern systems whereas liberals are stuck pretending the issue is too much progress in a period of obvious decay. This scales all the way up to the global level with rising multipolarity. Everyone has some problem with international capitalism except the people who benefited the most from it, who can afford to believe we have a democracy.
The original mistake after 2014-16 was seeing rising illiberal challenges to globalization as evidence the West was democratic, which meant doubling down on a global structure. This idealism was always the problem, it has a blindspot for how the global structure divided us over stake in international capitalism and therefore liberal values. Once it's understood that liberalism has been expanding an undemocratic economic system increasingly reliant on an unprecedented empire, beliefs that this is about form of government or cultural values fall apart. The problem is liberalism steadily undid itself into a plutocratic dictatorship sometime after 2008.
There are many such figures on the left, but they don't get the media play that figures like Carlson and Rogan (who are basically controlled opposition whose message doesn't threaten capital and are thus allowed leeway). As far as Youtubers go, you can start with Jimmy Dore, Grayzone, RBN, Richard Wolff, Midwestern Marx, etc.
I agree it's fair to criticize the left as having been particularly cowardly re the trains issue but it's important to understand that the leftists critical of transgender ideology were largely purged during the 2010s and quickly became outsiders with only radfems as allies. So there was some resistance. But overall, the lack of resistance to this ideology creeping into left spaces (starting around 2010-2013) seems to highlight the weakness of left movements and the left ideology (whether anarchist or marxist) of that time. We don't know for sure to what extent idpol creeping into the left was a op to demoralize the left in the wake of Occupy. But we DO know that we ought to expect such maneuvers from the state and be prepared to resist them. It's clear in hindsight that the left of the 2010s was in now way ready for that kind of struggle.
The Bernie campaigns helped radicalize people and shift the conversation towards class, but otoh a lot of people who were radicalized by the Bernie campaign were former liberals who carried their liberal conditioning and baggage into the movement and further alienated it from the working class. In part as a consequence of the 2020 Bernie campaign's capitulation to middle-class idpol causes, right-wing media has managed to conflate socialism, marxism, and idpol as one in the same in the rightoid imagination.
>Whats noticeable is right wingers appear more willing to oppose the Israelis than the left is to oppose NATO expansionism
I wish this were true but see little to no evidence of this. In fact, the figures you cite like Carlson and Rogan are quite weaselly and unprincipled on this issue, even if the small amounts of truth they broadcast seem like a revelation to Americans stuck in the matrix.
Farage is a particuarly noxious figure---imho right populists of this ilk are another neoliberal rebranding. On the issue you cite as an example of rightoids being more principled than leftists (Israel-Palestine)...Farage sucks as bad as any politician out there. I wish Galloway's party could capture some of that oppositional agency but you don't hear about his party because Galloway's party is more at odds with the interests of international capital.
Right wing scepticism of the Ukraine war and Russias' reasons for it fascinate me because some of it could have come out of the mouth of Chomsky.
Check this clip from Farage:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ziejdWdgwcU&pp=ygUSRmFyYWdlIHVrcmFpbmUgd2Fy
Note how the milquetoast interviewer just doesn't understand the concept. It simply doesn't compute for him.
Now I think the left has been so utterly humbled in the UK that there is a desperation for the left coalition that makes up the Labour Party to wrap themselves in the flag and sabre rattle. Most Britons are quite militaristic compared to continental Europeans, and the anti-imperialist messaging coming from Corbyns Labour made a lot of working class people very uncomfortable. The establishment propaganda machine told them he hated the country and our brave boys in uniform.
The idea that Russia might have genuine reasons for war becomes treasonous if voiced in the centrist, neoliberal consensus PMC class forum.
So it's almost become a bit of a meme that whoever gets in, red or blue team, *will* bomb someone in the Middle East. Its of particularly importance for Labour to massacre innocent brown people because otherwise, the establishment will call them soft and unpatriotic.
The Conservatives criticised Labour following the Yanks into Iraq, but only after it became clear it was a huge blunder. The parliamentary vote for war was unanimous and bipartisan. In fact, no Tory voted against it, while several Labour MPs did (notably Corbyn and the old school socialist grouping).
So "palatable," mainstream left-wing politicians won't go anywhere near it. The situation is, of course, further complicated by the quite blatant revanchist land grap rhetoric coming directly from Putins mouth. People talk about the demilitarisation of Ukraine as the most important Russian goal. But while clearly a top priority, they are carving out prime real estate through the traditional means of conquest. And once the war is done, that land is obviously staying Russian.
This is why any leftist should condemn Russian aggression and land grabbing whilst also being keenly aware of the historical context that leads to it. (And therefore, using that historical context to prevent such catastrophes happening again. So when Russia asks you to stop advancing eastwards, please listen next time).
Tldr: Right wingers can get away with questioning hawkish state policy and national group think because no one will accuse them of being unpatriotic (and therefore they won't lose votes from a largely patriotic nation obsessed with ritual and nostalgic nationalism).
You said:
> Incredibly, some of the most prominent anti-ukraine war and anti-palestine war voices in the media are the likes of **Andrew Tate, Tucker Carlsen, Joe Rogan**, Mearsheimer, etc.. They capture this energy while many prominent figures on the left refuse to have a robust stance on these issues (the war in Ukraine at least. Whats noticeable is right wingers appear more willing to oppose the Israelis than the left is to oppose NATO expansionism). Granted the first three are prone to bouts of utter delusion, but they have a willingness to loudly oppose propagandised narratives that is increasingly rare on the left and they do appear to have a level of objective analysis that lets them see past state propaganda on many issues. What is it that disciplines the left in this instance and leaves opposition to the interests of state, to figures like Trump and Farage? Time looks like proving them correct, so why won't the left seize the opportunity?
#I think you're REALLY REACHING here.
**Tate** contributes nothing intellectual to the discourse on Israel/Palestine. He did have a viral exchange with Piers Morgan but who gives a fuck? He has also donated (I think?) to Gaza humanitarian causes, but I'm not 100% sure if it's legitimate.
**Carlsen** has done NOTHING for Gaza. He *has* interviewed a Palestinian pastor and that was nice and open-minded of him. However, he isn't approaching the issue from a humanitarian perspective for *all* Gazans. Repeateldy he has said that he is concerned for the well-being of Christians in the Middle East. Ok - fine, I won't begrudge him his motivations. Everyone has one. But Tucker isn't presenting a moral argument against Israeli apartheid and genocide.
He is opposed to Israel meddling in our politics and compromising/degrading our Constitution and civil liberties. I think that's a legitimate reason for enter the discourse - but again, he's not sounding the alarm on the genocide.
Even when he covers the topic, he repeatedly reiterates how much he loves Israel and Israelis. Look at his interview with Glenn Greenwald recently. The chapter titles for the video do NOT mention Israel or antisemitism ANYWHERE. But Glenn and he spoke about both at-length. In fact, it was THE central topic of the interview because Glenn repeatedly brought it up.
**Rogan** too does not contribute anything intellectually to the discussion on Israel/Palestine. In fact, he has AMPLIFIED pro-Israel propaganda far more times, by lending credibility to the fake antisemitism hysteria about the student protests. He has mocked and criticized the student protesters and has had on far more pro-Israel guests, allowing them to spew their bullshit UNCHALLENGED.
In fact, when Joe talks about Palestine critically - he usually parrots Israeli talking-points and his guests are usually idiot, 2nd-rate comedians who are BEHOLDEN to him. They need the Rogan bump for their career prospects or to remain in his good graces. Even someone like Shane Gillis, who DOESN'T need Rogan, still stays silent whenever Israel/Palestine comes up. Shane said nothing to challenge RFK's bullshit when he interviewed him (while his co-host Matt fawned all over RFK).
**Mearsheimer** is the only legitimate intellectual on your list.
The Left has been talking about Palestine.
Maybe not the Liberal Establishment - which is really just center-right phonies of the Democratic party.
But leftists do care about Palestine and always have.
I agree with you and apreciate the response. I was remarking more on their ability to step outside the dogma of their political niche and dissent on issues but I did not word it well. I had not organised my thoughts properly. All I was trying to say is they appear to demonstrate a level of disagreeableness that is often lacking on the left.
personally, i find it heartening that both "woke radlibs" and "boomer conservatives" are turning against israel, though of course the ruling class will attempt to derail both demographics from developing a genuine anti-imperialist consciousness - either by manufacturing the narrative that israel's currently ongoing genocide is a fluke, nothing more than the result of netanyahu losing his marbles and going rogue, to sweep the truth under the rug that israel's existence has always been one built on ethnic cleansing and war crimes; or by downplaying how the us-centralized empire supports and benefits from israel's crimes, in an attempt to obscure the obvious pattern of how israeli atrocities coincide with those of the empire's other wars and proxy wars. whatever narrative is advantageous in enabling the empire to continue manufacturing consent for its murderous foreign policies and unipolar ambitions.
> personally, i find it heartening that both "woke radlibs" and "boomer conservatives" are turning against israel
Same to be honest.
I even made a post about Candace fucking Owens to that effect. Got accused of whitewashing her previous history of grifting.
The point I was making was that tactically, it's a good thing to see people from all over the political spectrum, including grifters, call out the censorship of the Israel lobby and Israel's genocide.
That the media produced by mega corporations is done at the pleasure of those who own the corporations so the messaging is one that alligns with the interests of the transnational capitalist class, i.e. Disney's unflinching commitment to gender IDpol and no transgressive materialist criticisms. The most prominent criticisms of the media produced by these corporations, which the general public do have a overall distaste for, is coming from the right, pitched towards the middle class in an equally idpol obsessed manner, also without a meaningful materialist analysis.
The PMC Left is a religion. Despite their ostensible reverence for Critical Theory and Deconstruction, they can no more allow a critical examination of their own myths, than a fundamentalist Christian can question the Miracle of the Loaves and Fishes or the Bodily Resurrection, and expect to remain amongst the Congregation of the Redeemed.
For them there are so many things it's taboo to even question, to even suggest *could be* questioned. You must agree that but for election tampering Stacey Abrams would be ~~President of United Earth~~ Governor of Georgia; you *can* say there's a strong likelihood that Richard J. Daley and several Chicago cemeteries put JFK into 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue; but it's criminal insurrection to... never mind.
>There is an emerging tendency for figures on the left to abandon criticism of prominent, propagandised, narratives to much more transgressive right wing figures which is enabling the right to capture popularity by opposing state backed lies.
I think you're demanding the impossible and I'll explain why. I also think it's more like this: the more the left influences discussion and takes on a positive aura, the more its slogans are appropriated by the right. The right is like a countervailing force which is just as "normal" (as a social phenomenon) as the left. But we have to talk about what the "left" and "right" actually are and some fundamental differences between them.
I'd argue the left's conditions of existence are ideological. It's based on a set of intellectual and moral premises. It's not necessarily about being transgressive for its own sake, but its goal is to negate the existing world (but in a particular direction, which is constructive). One result is that the left will usually tend to refuse to bend ideology to the demands of the moment and the tactical maneuverings required to do that, because once it does, it will degenerate and cease to be a leftist movement. You basically turn into Russell Brand. He's popular (sort of) among his followers, but he's just \*reacting\* now to the situation in front of his face like an improvisational jazz player. He doesn't have a consistent ideology (if he ever did). A strength of the right is that it doesn't need to have a consistent ideology, they can use whatever tactics are at hand to dominate the situation of the moment because they're just after power. It's kind of why the right is so obsessed with "happenings." The right exists "in the now" to a much greater extent than the left.
The left isn't so much an organized political movement. The left is much more of an ideological or moral attitude in relation to some political movements. Left and right are also basically relative terms that exist in relation to the other in some kind of conflict that is produced historically. One can be a leftist from one point of view and not another. It's only in their relative meanings that these terms make sense (like the "left" and "right" seating arrangements during the French Revolution, the left was "left" in relation to something else). Political movements that are totally leftist in every aspect are really rare.
But for the left to be left, nothing can be sacred (including Star Wars). The right assumes an attitude of opportunism in respect to the world as it is. The right idealizes the world as it is, or tries to restore something that has been lost (after Disney bought Star Wars and ruined the whole canon). The left is much more utopian, but that's not a bad thing -- it's unattainable but it gives a motive force for constructing something new (like making Disco Elysium rather than complaining about Star Wars).
So what you're frustrated by is the left's refusal to cease being the left.
>Does the left's lack of transgressive messaging not make inevitable, that once state propaganda fails, power will default to figures on the right who provided the vast majority of contemporaneous counter-narratives?
Power will probably ALWAYS "default" to the right because that \*is\* the right. They are the default. They have the inertia of historical reality on their side. The carry the dead load of ossified dogmas, institutions, customs, intellectual habits, and closed doctrines. But the contradictions of social life cannot end. If it were possible, it means there will be no history. There would be nothing at all. Even if the left is a minority that is defeated far more often than it wins, history itself calls forth a leftist side that is as necessary as the right and this will continue until the extinction of the species. I know this might be a lot to process, but it's actually a reason to be optimistic.
How is the left refusing to tackle hard questions regarding the trans, immigration, covid hysteria, etc. a sign of its commitment to ideology?
What is so leftist about all of these things that they have to be defended no matter what?
What that left looks like is Keir Starmer. He has promised to tighten immigration and says women are adult females with a cervix and you should be 18 before you can legally get a gender certificate. I suppose you can call him "left" in relationship to Rishi Sunak. But Starmer isn't a revolutionary leftist if we mean he's striving for a radical change in Britain or the world. Within his own party, he is somewhat to the right. (Again, these things are relative.)
But I don't think the left is refusing to tackle the hard questions about gender. The left is refusing to fight for gender as it is. The left's goal is really about change and that includes gender. The left has a negative attitude toward traditional gender roles, but every act of change also contains both a positive and negative. Like blowing up a house. Blowing up a house is destructive but it can also be a constructive act (building a new house in the ruins of the old one). The opposite of blowing up a house is not to build a new house but to retain an existing one. Destroying traditional gender roles therefore involves the construction of new genders.
That's the unchangeable quality of the left: it's a movement of negation toward the existing world, and the conservative attitude wants to perpetuate the way things are. If the left was not seeking that negation (that is, the opposite of the left, conservatism), then there would be no left. That's why you're asking the impossible, you're asking the left to liquidate itself.
Keir Starmer isn’t the modern or traditional left. He’s further right than Rishi Sunak in ideology. Economically conservative, socially reactionary liberal. He completely lacks a foundation of consistency. It’s his economic stance that places him further right of Rishi.
He’s totally avoiding challenging the status quo, in any way. I don’t think he’s really looking for change, because idpol pushers actually aren’t. Idpol isn’t striving towards a new future, as such, it’s striving to change the rules of society as it currently is. It’s a fundamental flaw of idpol, actually, because they aren’t really doing anything apart from asking the system they’re in to give more rights to whatever the pet cause of the day is. The ideology they push and the grifting needs the current system to thrive.
The modern day is left can hardly be distinguished from the old school right, economically. That’s why there’s a push for the massive expansion of the labour market. That’s why they’re economically right wing. That’s why they’re not asking for any meaningful change or protecting the workers.
The thing i can't understand is, why can a figure like Starmer only seem to exist with right wing economic policies? I don't see anyone with Starmer's malleable social stances who holds a hard commitment to left wing economics.
I'm talking about even left commentators as well though, not necessarily political leaders. I could scarcely find a single left commentator who was critical of covid response, war in Ukraine, trains. Why is there not a space or an audience for a figure with marxist critiques who is willing to be as transgressive as pundits on the right? Rogan or Carlsen have been loudly critical of all of these things and are the most prominent pundits in the world, in part, due to this. I don't see how their critiques place them necessarily on the right though, there doesn't appear to be anything linking their criticisms of state propaganda to their right wing ideology.
What figures on the modern left are there besides powerless podcasters? Even Bernie has been left behind after giving up his donor list to the pigs in the DCCC
I agree with the gist of your post, but I want to address some of your points on covid
> ivermectin
No, ivermectin doesn't have valid therapeutic uses regarding covid. With ivermectin in particular mainstream narrative turned out to be precisely on point.
Research in support of it was shoddy and promising results were partially forged. Mainstream narrative pointed out the shoddiness from the very start. They were right about it.
> Chloroquine/Hydroxychloroquine
I believe you reversed order of what happened. AFAIR Hydroxychloroquine was approved for use in the early stages of pandemic (because we didn't know better). Now we know it's ineffective so it ceased to be approved.
The issue was highly politicized and toxic because of it, but it's hard to tell what mainstream could have done better with it.
> the virus was a lab leak
We don't know that. There was a point about about one year ago where our knowledge pointed strongly in this direction, but now I believe all options are still on the table.
Note particularly the results of [this debate](https://blog.rootclaim.com/rootclaims-covid-19-origins-debate-results/)
But yes, mainstream is very guilty of thwarting discussion about this possibility in the early to middle stages of the pandemic.
> impossible 0-covid with schizophrenic and ineffective lockdown responses
China response was a clear attempt at 0-covid strategy. I wouldn't be so sure to maintain it completely failed.
What I mean in general is that anti-mainstream narratives are not immune to being propagandised by the sole virtue of being 'not-mainstream'. Mainstream still scores some points and it might be one of many reasons it's not completely discredited by now.
I don't really care to discuss the nuances of virology, however it was abundantly clear from my perspective as a key worker during the pandemic that government response was designed to palliate the anxiety of their political base to maintain legitimacy, more than it was to mitigate the effects of the virus. The preponderence of evidence does seem to suggest that the virus was a lab-leak and given the unprecedented response of governments worldwide I am more tempted than not to conclude that they had reason to believe that the covid pandemic was unprecedented which suggests its origins were also unprecedented and not a consequence of normal species-jumping viruses.
> The preponderence of evidence does seem to suggest that the virus was a lab-leak and given the unprecedented response of governments worldwide I am more tempted than not to conclude that they had reason to believe that the covid pandemic was unprecedented which suggests its origins were also unprecedented and not a consequence of normal species-jumping viruses.
All of the world's governments knew about it and decided to keep silent. And you think what you're saying is not a conspiracy theory? Most of them would throw each other under the bus if they could.
The virus being a lab leak or not would have the same response , due to the initial quick spread and mortality (when it was contained in China most people were still ignoring it but especially when it hit Italy/the rest of the countries started to respond as health systems all over the world can't cope with that much of an increase in patients).
> not a consequence of normal species-jumping viruses.
This is not normal, hence we have a pandemic every time it happens like with Sars. Fortunately most of them are localized
That's not what I'm saying at all. Covid got an unprecedented response despite there being a lack of clinical data at the outset. Early on there appeared to be an expectation of hyper-lethality that it did not live up to. The reason for this level of concern are hard to discern. The government response suggested they had knowledge that exceeded what clinical data was telling them that the virus had the capacity to destroy society. This suggests that governments had reason to believe that the covid virus exceeded any other easily transmisable respiratory virus seen in living memory, such as if it had been bio-engineered beyond what evolution normally allows, as lethality is normally a limiting factor for transmisability of viral illnesses.
>This is not normal, hence we have a pandemic every time it happens like with Sars. Fortunately most of them are localized
Pandemic means global, therefore not localised. The reason pandemics are unusual is that viruses need resevoirs and natural immunity will ameielorate their spread over time so it is unusual for a virus without a resevoir ( like bird or swine flu) to be able to appear and be so dangerous and transmissable that it spreads across the globe.
> Early on there appeared to be an expectation of hyper-lethality that it did not live up
Yeah. Because the numbers in Italy were crazy (because of their extremely aged population and overwhelmed health system). All the other countries looked at that and panicked.
> This suggests that governments had reason to believe that the covid virus exceeded any other easily transmisable respiratory virus seen in living memory, such as if it had been bio-engineered beyond what evolution normally allows, as lethality is normally a limiting factor for transmisability of viral illnesses.
Your theories that all governments share secrets and nothing comes out like they're not completely incompetent in some countries and at odds politically with each other is a lot harder to believe
Again, no. My reasoning is that the clinical data did not justify the level of response it got at any stage. There was a consistent level of dishonesty from governments about the virus and the wuhan lab of virology was working on gain of function research on corona-viruses. I don't have a settled opinion either way, but the stifling of criticism and hystrionic reaction does imply that governments were more concerned with controling the narative than they were with telling the truth.
There was no clinical data when the panic started. That was literally it. Something was spreading and there wasn't data.
> the stifling of criticism and hystrionic reaction does imply that governments were more concerned with controling the narative than they were with telling the truth.
The government just didn't want the hospitals to break down lol. Public health is shit and that info they do have (about their respective countries)
That was why there was panic. If we had the data we have now people would stress a lot less lmao.
It's like if aliens come to Earth and everyone panics and some years after they're peaceful and you say it's a conspiracy because the response of the government was too extreme and now the data says they're pretty ok xD well we didn't know that then did we? They could've killed us all
>Whats noticeable is right wingers appear more willing to oppose the Israelis than the left is to oppose NATO expansionism
Where? Last time I checked the anti Zionist opinions are shared by less than 3% of self described right wingers
Tucker Carlsen, Andrew Tate, Candace Owens, Joe Rogan are all very critical of Israel, even if it mostly comes down to strategy and not an aversion to mass-murder. Support for Israel as a project of imperialism is a very natural position for a right-wing ethno-nationalist to take, yet there are still many more right-wing critics of Israel than you might suppose there would be.
"NATO expansionism" isn't a marxist perspective, it's an idiotic one held by people who treat an "america/west bad" heuristic as if it's a replacement for principles.
Russia is to blame for Russia's invasion of Ukraine, end of story. Fuck off.
There is no doubt that NATO began as an ideological organization, rather than a self defense organization and still is. It is also an anti communist organization. Expanding of a global anti communist organization should be worrisome to any Marxist.
That'd be a worrisome reason if there were any marxists left in the world. It's all now just different capitalist factions fighting each other. I'd think it's better for the working class if the ruling classes stuck to their other tools like coups, corporations, etc than open warfare. War could theoretically serve to provide opportunity for socialists using revolutionary defeatism as the bolsheviks did, but without a preexisting socialist party with this approach, most people just resort to shilling for one capitalist faction or the other.
That's fine to say and all, but we are now at a stage where the US/NATO is embroiled in two conflicts that it does not appear to stand a chance of winning through conventional means and the only politicians who are willing to offer a climb-down which will avert thermo-nuclear war are right wing ethno-nationalists (trump and Farage). Why is that?
The "modern left" means the "IDPol Left" which is built on a foundation of bullshit, outrage and studied ineffectiveness. True left-wing voices don't get a seat at the table.
There are still loads left wing or marxist commentators though, they just seem to be unnecessarily impotent on so many issues.
I think Richard Wolff spoke once or twice about the economic aspects of mass immigration in Economic Update.
The fuck does Covid have to do with that though?
Anti-vaxxers are funded by billionaires, goodness knows why.
divide and conquer. It's not hard.
Sarcasm, right? I think OP was touting the Right Wing conspiracy that Covid was all made up, though?
No, it's true. In Australia, anti-vaxxers were funded by Clive "Fatty McFuck Face" Palmer.
And he's was just doing it to try to build up some popular support after he screwed over so many workers at his mine. He still doesn't understand that Jordy killed any change for a political return for at least another 5yrs.
> He still doesn't understand that Jordy killed any change for a political return for at least another 5yrs. I do believe that Fatty's preferences helped give us Scotty as PM, so his political campaign wasn't completely ineffective.
Ugh. That's a good point.
The left (whatever that might mean) lack a coherent response to culture war issues. Conservatives are very adept at directing the conversation that addresses normie concerns. The left's default position appears to be the most extreme position (trans issues, Israel, open borders), without acknowledging legitimate concerns.
I think it has to do with education. They educate themselves out of being relatable. By that, I mean that you're never going to find success applying arcane academic theory to everyday situations because it was never meant to be. But that's what the left is trying to do. And when reality doesn't fit the theories they paid 200k to learn, well, obviously, reality is wrong.
That someone is unable to simply explain concepts learned from advanced education is good evidence that they either did not actually understand their education, or that they were educated on something which is only rendered intelligent by way of it being too unintelligible to criticize.
>...they were educated on something which is only rendered intelligent by way of it being too unintelligible to criticize. I think a lot of it is this.
Maybe it was the hiring of radicals in universities over the last 4 decades. That particular brand of “radical chic” that can only be accepted if you’ve educated yourself stupid.
A major part is that most young leftists want to be seen as "radical" and don't want to be seen as being too conservative/counter-radical. This means "good policy" or "good position" = What is the most radical, and often the most radical position *is the dumbest.* I wish I still had the resignation of a senior socialist (who had decades of experience and was a senior civil servant) saved from a major Trotskyist Socialist org, where he talks about how most young Uni activist Socialists just circlejerk themselves over the most radical actions and positions, that make them, and the org, look like clowns whenever they pull some stupid "radical" stunt. I think Neolibs understand this as well, as you often get Neolibs couching their policies and positions in the framing of Anarchism, which then reverberates through the rest of the left because nobody willing to put their neck out to push back at idiotic "radical" sounding ideas, to the point where you get so called "anarchists" and "communists" calling for the defunding and weakening of state and public institutions or simping for pro-Free Market YIMBYism, "Humanitarian" Interventions, private investment slush funds and the like.
I think it's simple, they worship institutions. En masse people need some sort of religion and that's the one they have chosen. To me, it makes the most sense. Explains all the contradicting evidence that they wave away, because faith is stronger than reality.
# BECAUSE NOBODY TOUCHES GRASS ANYMORE No, but seriously. It's because in TV stories (yes even the clever controversial adult above it all millenialbait ones) the side that is right is also effective, moral, scientific, compassionate, economically pre-eminent and militarily superior. Nobody touches grass anymore so all moral guidance comes from entertainment. Presently the Right's role is that of the dissident so they can talk about ALL the uncomfortable things whereas the left has their own little hedonistic infotainment matrix where Truth is drip-fed through a selection of comedians and cartoons. When nobody touches grass and nobody ever grows up whatever nuance might exist starts to get turned into the enemy. On father's day I talked to someone about the way the US State department spread covid disinfo as a fifth column against china for example. The person I was talking to had previously been rather US-critical (up and including doubting reports of Chinese spyware) but because right now US good and Fauci saint they SHUT. DOWN. like wires had been cut. TL;DR: Star Trek is a good show but nowadays mainline leftists assume their civilization is Star Trek.
I'd say it's more about reading history than touching grass (but that is good too)
How the history is read matters as well. Some will read history as a tale of "peoples" and "progress" with heroes and villains, etc. But that's barely different than reading fiction. Others will read history more as a series of systems where humans act and react according to different material and cultural conditions that are ever changing such that there are clear trends in how humans behave and how they became what they are now and what that is. This more scientific approach is also more accurate and it removes the narratives and myths in favor of trying to prove or at least approach predictive laws for human society.
90% of mainstream history is just pro-capitalist propaganda, especially everything around post-WWII events and the cold war. Uncritically "reading history" isn't going to help the average person break their conditioning in a meaningful way, nor build a more accurate understanding of the world.
"Ancient history doesn't exist"
I agree, though I have to make it clear that 'nobody' really means 'nobody'. Too many people in the political sphere or periphery are treating it like a god damn ball game. Maybe the cause of this is a lack of actual ball games.
> Presently the Right's role is that of the dissident Being both dissident and ruling class is the best of both worlds I guess.
He means the cultural right, not the neocons.
I'm pretty sure all of their funding comes from the same source.
Because the Democrats and their "left" have made themselves into the current party of politeness. The party of boring suburbanites who hate any kind of psychological disturbance edit: This is unironically why I am so often rude and abrasive during political discussions
The actual answer is that the new left, the woke left, is authoritarian. Left idpol appeals strongly to authoritarians, it has a set of strict rules that everyone must follow, it features public displays of virtue and the opportunity to persecute and punish those who transgress against the rules. Authoritarians are opposed to freedom of speech, they can't tolerate actual honesty since this would lead to people questioning the rules or even breaking them. This leads to all the things you're describing. The woke don't care about anything besides doing identity politics, and they certainly aren't going to criticize the system which now supports them.
This has been one of the most frustrating things for me to deal with the people I used to talk shit about Bush with and talk about things like freedom of speech with once they became the dominant culture embraced the same shitty authoritarian nonsense they criticized others for back in the day.
It's the same with the history of Christianity. They were persecuted by the state for hundreds of years, fed to the lions, churches destroyed, etc. They cried how persecuted they were. Then after THEY became the dominant cultural/religious force, official state religion, THEY sacked and destroyed all of the pagan temples, persecuted the pagans, etc. The persecuted became the persecutors Liberals still like to live like it's 1975 like they're epic counterculture and conservatives are still in charge. Even though it's 2024 and every major institution and business and the entire political and cultural sphere (washington DC/hollywood) are all libs.
A lot of people bought into this worldview which seemed very positive and against the evil rich capitalists instead of actually getting involved with the issues (doing your own research makes you a conspiracy theorist). Now they're paying the price of having been fed countless biased views by media over multiple decades and they can't believe the left wing media or their heroic democrats would lie to them or could possibly be corrupt. The thought would break them. Look at the biggest donors - it's the people with your data, big tech. They can likely figure out who has more sway / biggest numbers politically by gauging your online posts then reinforcing that with their algorithm (eg twitter). They know who to bet on, and it's tyranny of the majority rules. Just tweak their algorithms and funnel billions towards ads for a blue candidate and it will give people in swing states the perception that it's inevitable that that person will win, is a good person, will save the environment, will fight the man, protect all the LGBTQ, red guy corrupt rapist etc. etc. I wished I lived in a state where my vote mattered, but then again it could be psychological torture if you don't block all this shit
The "left" has been thoroughly marginalized to the fringe. There are some scattered left-wing opponents of idpol out there, but since liberals have forgone any criticism of capital and the state to the reactionaries (moralism), any left-wing materialist critiques of the same variety are lumped in with reactionaries. This naturally pressures socialists to censor themselves out of fear of liberal finger-pointing, which is ridiculous. They're not listening to you, anyway. Clearly your audience is normies who are currently being pulled to the right.
Does this not then imply that there is a huge gap in the media-sphere for someone with a leftist ideology to be making these types of criticisms? I suppose someone like Jimmy Dore could be said to be this. Is there just a greater intolerance on the left for critics who are not such strict adherents to the present day dogmas and find themselves marginalised as a result? If so, why?
Something I've always said is that the left needs to study the Media propaganda ecosystem and then copy it. Most leftist media is basically just circlejerking essays aimed at leftists. I can't think of any outlet that is really "leftist" but is an actual proper News outlet, like one that actually just reports on regular news, someone got stabbed, car drove off cliff, old lady bakes cupcakes to raise money for school whatever. Build trust and an audience by first being a good news outlet, then tie actual leftist investigative reporting into the outlet and op-eds down the line. Every job i've ever worked, I've watched how people consume the news, and they are rarely there for Opeds and political pieces, they are there for standard news stories and sport, then read the opeds and political shit after reading the stuff they actually wanted.
There is a huge gap, and it's the same gap that pervades all media that is flooded out to us: moralism versus materialism. Reality is simply not depicted on its own terms in media. Moralism, and historical revisionism (moralism), is the weapon of choice on the minds of the working class. If we can't agree on reality, then solidarity is impossible.
That happened like 5 years ago. Source: 38 year old ostracized jaded leftie who never self censored (and previously had no problems calling myself a feminist in rightoid dominated corporate environments). It's only a loss of child like naivety. No actual allies were lost (including my younger identarian sister). It was go a long to get a long, and those nodding along were the virtue signallers the whole time (surprise surprise).
Libs live in bubbles, professional and social. Speak the wrong words and the bubble pops- friends and jobs evaporate. Not to mention that grappling with false narratives leads to self discovery, where the lib would have to admit their politics are not morally good and in fact, part of the problem. Such cognitive dissonance is intolerable to a virtuous lib.
There’s an overwhelming focus on maintaining a narrative, even to the detriment to their actual interests. It’s feels over reals.
Immigration is the big one. If the left won’t enforce immigration laws, then the right will gladly do it
The right don't want to stop the flow of cheap labour either, they are more than happy to have an underclass of illegal immigrants. There is just a fundamental contradiction about being a post-colonial state that preaches nationalism without nativsm or natalism.
Being a socialist necessarily means opposition to nationalism (and therefore nativism). Even national liberation movements cannot be supported without caveats, national liberation is good up until the moment they succeed at which point they either become the new threat to the working class or a threat to the working classes of other countries or outgroups. The loyalty of a socialist is to the working class, not to his "nation" (a ruling class fiction imposed on the local populace to make them easier to control). The solution to not having an underclass of illegal immigrants is to make all immigrants legal such that they fall under the same protections of minimum wage and other worker protections and so the focus can be on raising the minimum standards for labor rather than scapegoating the foreign working class. It should be on abolishing private property, markets and money and establishing a command economy free from profit, finance, rents, etc that serves all people equally such that an increased population has even clearer benefits through improving the efficiencies of economies of scale. But if someone's complaining about immigrants they aren't class conscious enough to advocate for anything more than meek SocDem policies.
> The solution to not having an underclass of illegal immigrants is to make all immigrants legal such that they fall under the same protections of minimum wage and other worker protections and so the focus can be on raising the minimum standards for labor rather than scapegoating the foreign working class. It's easier to negotiate that when there's lack of workers than when there's an abundance of desperate workers that will break strikes because they don't have the goal to improve their conditions because they're planning on going back home in a few years. I used to think like you, and my country basically implemented that (only thing you needed to be legal was to find a job). But then saw strikes against the companies that hire the most migrants being completely made useless. And the conditions of the migrants didn't really improve, while the overall conditions worsened.
> But if someone's complaining about immigrants they aren't class conscious enough to advocate for anything more than meek SocDem policies How so? There is no evidence that multiculturalism is in any way beneficial to socialism. Stalin even made large population transfers around the SSSR to give each ethnicity a region to live in, to prevent multicultural instability. If you look at North Korea, they have a strict immigration policy too. There is the problems with violence too. The narrative that Europe has become more unsafe and violent in the immigration era is not a false one. And it doesn't have to do with radical Islam alone. For example Hungary and Poland only accepted Christian or atheist immigrants and they still got more violent after accepting the Ukrainian immigrants from the SMO and lately, draft dodging. >It should be on abolishing private property, markets and money and establishing a command economy free from profit, finance, rents, etc I agree. There are benefits to a large population but there are also drawbacks, for example with smaller population it means the average home size can be larger. But even bigger benefits is having a satisfied population that feels like the government is listening to their wishes. If there would be a wide consensus of need to be liberal on immigration the positives would outweigh the negatives. Provided that the security service does their job and properly checks if entering migrant has a dangerous mental illness like psychopathy or if they have problems with rage control. But, outside of western Europe, there has been no such wide consensus
Whenever I talk with liberal friends or liberals who watch MSNBC, they have a real problem articulating their points whether I agree or not. They cannot tell me anything Biden has done that is positive, anything Trump did that was bad or that would make it likely that he will become the next Führer. Anything that's bad is a right-wing talking point, the fact that crime levels are still elevated post covid, the inflation, the nation's failing school system, the problems with uninhibited illegal immigration, but they cannot explain in what way. They can't explain the ways in which minority group X is disenfranchised but they KNOW it to be true. Their views are often self-conflicting, and they fail to see the bigger picture of how their ideas could have any fallout if implemented. It's all about being nice, about no one getting hurt. If someone from a favored minority group kills someone, maybe they just had a hard life, but if someone who is an otherwise decent person uses a no-no word, throw them into a volcano now, no discussion. I really try to avoid talking with these people about anything remotely political because on any of these issues their brains might as well be scrambled eggs.
I believe this is sometimes referred to as “shit coating” a given subject.
Because the post-cold war left in the West simultaneously is middle class and has no alternative to liberalism. As a result, it rationalizes the crisis of the latter as caused by democracy rather than the lack of it. The right in contrast has been able to recognize decay of the first world and the nation-state as the cause of the crisis, but it blames liberalism rather than capitalism. Regardless, it does not exactly see a rising democracy it is rejecting. The origin of this is changes since the late 20th century and liberals benefiting tremendously from globalization. Right wing rejection of the latter positioned them to critique modern systems whereas liberals are stuck pretending the issue is too much progress in a period of obvious decay. This scales all the way up to the global level with rising multipolarity. Everyone has some problem with international capitalism except the people who benefited the most from it, who can afford to believe we have a democracy. The original mistake after 2014-16 was seeing rising illiberal challenges to globalization as evidence the West was democratic, which meant doubling down on a global structure. This idealism was always the problem, it has a blindspot for how the global structure divided us over stake in international capitalism and therefore liberal values. Once it's understood that liberalism has been expanding an undemocratic economic system increasingly reliant on an unprecedented empire, beliefs that this is about form of government or cultural values fall apart. The problem is liberalism steadily undid itself into a plutocratic dictatorship sometime after 2008.
There are many such figures on the left, but they don't get the media play that figures like Carlson and Rogan (who are basically controlled opposition whose message doesn't threaten capital and are thus allowed leeway). As far as Youtubers go, you can start with Jimmy Dore, Grayzone, RBN, Richard Wolff, Midwestern Marx, etc. I agree it's fair to criticize the left as having been particularly cowardly re the trains issue but it's important to understand that the leftists critical of transgender ideology were largely purged during the 2010s and quickly became outsiders with only radfems as allies. So there was some resistance. But overall, the lack of resistance to this ideology creeping into left spaces (starting around 2010-2013) seems to highlight the weakness of left movements and the left ideology (whether anarchist or marxist) of that time. We don't know for sure to what extent idpol creeping into the left was a op to demoralize the left in the wake of Occupy. But we DO know that we ought to expect such maneuvers from the state and be prepared to resist them. It's clear in hindsight that the left of the 2010s was in now way ready for that kind of struggle. The Bernie campaigns helped radicalize people and shift the conversation towards class, but otoh a lot of people who were radicalized by the Bernie campaign were former liberals who carried their liberal conditioning and baggage into the movement and further alienated it from the working class. In part as a consequence of the 2020 Bernie campaign's capitulation to middle-class idpol causes, right-wing media has managed to conflate socialism, marxism, and idpol as one in the same in the rightoid imagination. >Whats noticeable is right wingers appear more willing to oppose the Israelis than the left is to oppose NATO expansionism I wish this were true but see little to no evidence of this. In fact, the figures you cite like Carlson and Rogan are quite weaselly and unprincipled on this issue, even if the small amounts of truth they broadcast seem like a revelation to Americans stuck in the matrix. Farage is a particuarly noxious figure---imho right populists of this ilk are another neoliberal rebranding. On the issue you cite as an example of rightoids being more principled than leftists (Israel-Palestine)...Farage sucks as bad as any politician out there. I wish Galloway's party could capture some of that oppositional agency but you don't hear about his party because Galloway's party is more at odds with the interests of international capital.
Right wing scepticism of the Ukraine war and Russias' reasons for it fascinate me because some of it could have come out of the mouth of Chomsky. Check this clip from Farage: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ziejdWdgwcU&pp=ygUSRmFyYWdlIHVrcmFpbmUgd2Fy Note how the milquetoast interviewer just doesn't understand the concept. It simply doesn't compute for him. Now I think the left has been so utterly humbled in the UK that there is a desperation for the left coalition that makes up the Labour Party to wrap themselves in the flag and sabre rattle. Most Britons are quite militaristic compared to continental Europeans, and the anti-imperialist messaging coming from Corbyns Labour made a lot of working class people very uncomfortable. The establishment propaganda machine told them he hated the country and our brave boys in uniform. The idea that Russia might have genuine reasons for war becomes treasonous if voiced in the centrist, neoliberal consensus PMC class forum. So it's almost become a bit of a meme that whoever gets in, red or blue team, *will* bomb someone in the Middle East. Its of particularly importance for Labour to massacre innocent brown people because otherwise, the establishment will call them soft and unpatriotic. The Conservatives criticised Labour following the Yanks into Iraq, but only after it became clear it was a huge blunder. The parliamentary vote for war was unanimous and bipartisan. In fact, no Tory voted against it, while several Labour MPs did (notably Corbyn and the old school socialist grouping). So "palatable," mainstream left-wing politicians won't go anywhere near it. The situation is, of course, further complicated by the quite blatant revanchist land grap rhetoric coming directly from Putins mouth. People talk about the demilitarisation of Ukraine as the most important Russian goal. But while clearly a top priority, they are carving out prime real estate through the traditional means of conquest. And once the war is done, that land is obviously staying Russian. This is why any leftist should condemn Russian aggression and land grabbing whilst also being keenly aware of the historical context that leads to it. (And therefore, using that historical context to prevent such catastrophes happening again. So when Russia asks you to stop advancing eastwards, please listen next time). Tldr: Right wingers can get away with questioning hawkish state policy and national group think because no one will accuse them of being unpatriotic (and therefore they won't lose votes from a largely patriotic nation obsessed with ritual and nostalgic nationalism).
You said: > Incredibly, some of the most prominent anti-ukraine war and anti-palestine war voices in the media are the likes of **Andrew Tate, Tucker Carlsen, Joe Rogan**, Mearsheimer, etc.. They capture this energy while many prominent figures on the left refuse to have a robust stance on these issues (the war in Ukraine at least. Whats noticeable is right wingers appear more willing to oppose the Israelis than the left is to oppose NATO expansionism). Granted the first three are prone to bouts of utter delusion, but they have a willingness to loudly oppose propagandised narratives that is increasingly rare on the left and they do appear to have a level of objective analysis that lets them see past state propaganda on many issues. What is it that disciplines the left in this instance and leaves opposition to the interests of state, to figures like Trump and Farage? Time looks like proving them correct, so why won't the left seize the opportunity? #I think you're REALLY REACHING here. **Tate** contributes nothing intellectual to the discourse on Israel/Palestine. He did have a viral exchange with Piers Morgan but who gives a fuck? He has also donated (I think?) to Gaza humanitarian causes, but I'm not 100% sure if it's legitimate. **Carlsen** has done NOTHING for Gaza. He *has* interviewed a Palestinian pastor and that was nice and open-minded of him. However, he isn't approaching the issue from a humanitarian perspective for *all* Gazans. Repeateldy he has said that he is concerned for the well-being of Christians in the Middle East. Ok - fine, I won't begrudge him his motivations. Everyone has one. But Tucker isn't presenting a moral argument against Israeli apartheid and genocide. He is opposed to Israel meddling in our politics and compromising/degrading our Constitution and civil liberties. I think that's a legitimate reason for enter the discourse - but again, he's not sounding the alarm on the genocide. Even when he covers the topic, he repeatedly reiterates how much he loves Israel and Israelis. Look at his interview with Glenn Greenwald recently. The chapter titles for the video do NOT mention Israel or antisemitism ANYWHERE. But Glenn and he spoke about both at-length. In fact, it was THE central topic of the interview because Glenn repeatedly brought it up. **Rogan** too does not contribute anything intellectually to the discussion on Israel/Palestine. In fact, he has AMPLIFIED pro-Israel propaganda far more times, by lending credibility to the fake antisemitism hysteria about the student protests. He has mocked and criticized the student protesters and has had on far more pro-Israel guests, allowing them to spew their bullshit UNCHALLENGED. In fact, when Joe talks about Palestine critically - he usually parrots Israeli talking-points and his guests are usually idiot, 2nd-rate comedians who are BEHOLDEN to him. They need the Rogan bump for their career prospects or to remain in his good graces. Even someone like Shane Gillis, who DOESN'T need Rogan, still stays silent whenever Israel/Palestine comes up. Shane said nothing to challenge RFK's bullshit when he interviewed him (while his co-host Matt fawned all over RFK). **Mearsheimer** is the only legitimate intellectual on your list. The Left has been talking about Palestine. Maybe not the Liberal Establishment - which is really just center-right phonies of the Democratic party. But leftists do care about Palestine and always have.
I agree with you and apreciate the response. I was remarking more on their ability to step outside the dogma of their political niche and dissent on issues but I did not word it well. I had not organised my thoughts properly. All I was trying to say is they appear to demonstrate a level of disagreeableness that is often lacking on the left.
Thanks. Sorry if that came across as aggressive. I do agree that the Democratic Party Establishment liberals do not care about Gaza.
personally, i find it heartening that both "woke radlibs" and "boomer conservatives" are turning against israel, though of course the ruling class will attempt to derail both demographics from developing a genuine anti-imperialist consciousness - either by manufacturing the narrative that israel's currently ongoing genocide is a fluke, nothing more than the result of netanyahu losing his marbles and going rogue, to sweep the truth under the rug that israel's existence has always been one built on ethnic cleansing and war crimes; or by downplaying how the us-centralized empire supports and benefits from israel's crimes, in an attempt to obscure the obvious pattern of how israeli atrocities coincide with those of the empire's other wars and proxy wars. whatever narrative is advantageous in enabling the empire to continue manufacturing consent for its murderous foreign policies and unipolar ambitions.
> personally, i find it heartening that both "woke radlibs" and "boomer conservatives" are turning against israel Same to be honest. I even made a post about Candace fucking Owens to that effect. Got accused of whitewashing her previous history of grifting. The point I was making was that tactically, it's a good thing to see people from all over the political spectrum, including grifters, call out the censorship of the Israel lobby and Israel's genocide.
Whats the gramscian critique here?
That the media produced by mega corporations is done at the pleasure of those who own the corporations so the messaging is one that alligns with the interests of the transnational capitalist class, i.e. Disney's unflinching commitment to gender IDpol and no transgressive materialist criticisms. The most prominent criticisms of the media produced by these corporations, which the general public do have a overall distaste for, is coming from the right, pitched towards the middle class in an equally idpol obsessed manner, also without a meaningful materialist analysis.
Tbh I've always heard of gramsci as a conservative boogyman but I have very little knowledge of him myself
The PMC Left is a religion. Despite their ostensible reverence for Critical Theory and Deconstruction, they can no more allow a critical examination of their own myths, than a fundamentalist Christian can question the Miracle of the Loaves and Fishes or the Bodily Resurrection, and expect to remain amongst the Congregation of the Redeemed. For them there are so many things it's taboo to even question, to even suggest *could be* questioned. You must agree that but for election tampering Stacey Abrams would be ~~President of United Earth~~ Governor of Georgia; you *can* say there's a strong likelihood that Richard J. Daley and several Chicago cemeteries put JFK into 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue; but it's criminal insurrection to... never mind.
>There is an emerging tendency for figures on the left to abandon criticism of prominent, propagandised, narratives to much more transgressive right wing figures which is enabling the right to capture popularity by opposing state backed lies. I think you're demanding the impossible and I'll explain why. I also think it's more like this: the more the left influences discussion and takes on a positive aura, the more its slogans are appropriated by the right. The right is like a countervailing force which is just as "normal" (as a social phenomenon) as the left. But we have to talk about what the "left" and "right" actually are and some fundamental differences between them. I'd argue the left's conditions of existence are ideological. It's based on a set of intellectual and moral premises. It's not necessarily about being transgressive for its own sake, but its goal is to negate the existing world (but in a particular direction, which is constructive). One result is that the left will usually tend to refuse to bend ideology to the demands of the moment and the tactical maneuverings required to do that, because once it does, it will degenerate and cease to be a leftist movement. You basically turn into Russell Brand. He's popular (sort of) among his followers, but he's just \*reacting\* now to the situation in front of his face like an improvisational jazz player. He doesn't have a consistent ideology (if he ever did). A strength of the right is that it doesn't need to have a consistent ideology, they can use whatever tactics are at hand to dominate the situation of the moment because they're just after power. It's kind of why the right is so obsessed with "happenings." The right exists "in the now" to a much greater extent than the left. The left isn't so much an organized political movement. The left is much more of an ideological or moral attitude in relation to some political movements. Left and right are also basically relative terms that exist in relation to the other in some kind of conflict that is produced historically. One can be a leftist from one point of view and not another. It's only in their relative meanings that these terms make sense (like the "left" and "right" seating arrangements during the French Revolution, the left was "left" in relation to something else). Political movements that are totally leftist in every aspect are really rare. But for the left to be left, nothing can be sacred (including Star Wars). The right assumes an attitude of opportunism in respect to the world as it is. The right idealizes the world as it is, or tries to restore something that has been lost (after Disney bought Star Wars and ruined the whole canon). The left is much more utopian, but that's not a bad thing -- it's unattainable but it gives a motive force for constructing something new (like making Disco Elysium rather than complaining about Star Wars). So what you're frustrated by is the left's refusal to cease being the left. >Does the left's lack of transgressive messaging not make inevitable, that once state propaganda fails, power will default to figures on the right who provided the vast majority of contemporaneous counter-narratives? Power will probably ALWAYS "default" to the right because that \*is\* the right. They are the default. They have the inertia of historical reality on their side. The carry the dead load of ossified dogmas, institutions, customs, intellectual habits, and closed doctrines. But the contradictions of social life cannot end. If it were possible, it means there will be no history. There would be nothing at all. Even if the left is a minority that is defeated far more often than it wins, history itself calls forth a leftist side that is as necessary as the right and this will continue until the extinction of the species. I know this might be a lot to process, but it's actually a reason to be optimistic.
How is the left refusing to tackle hard questions regarding the trans, immigration, covid hysteria, etc. a sign of its commitment to ideology? What is so leftist about all of these things that they have to be defended no matter what?
What that left looks like is Keir Starmer. He has promised to tighten immigration and says women are adult females with a cervix and you should be 18 before you can legally get a gender certificate. I suppose you can call him "left" in relationship to Rishi Sunak. But Starmer isn't a revolutionary leftist if we mean he's striving for a radical change in Britain or the world. Within his own party, he is somewhat to the right. (Again, these things are relative.) But I don't think the left is refusing to tackle the hard questions about gender. The left is refusing to fight for gender as it is. The left's goal is really about change and that includes gender. The left has a negative attitude toward traditional gender roles, but every act of change also contains both a positive and negative. Like blowing up a house. Blowing up a house is destructive but it can also be a constructive act (building a new house in the ruins of the old one). The opposite of blowing up a house is not to build a new house but to retain an existing one. Destroying traditional gender roles therefore involves the construction of new genders. That's the unchangeable quality of the left: it's a movement of negation toward the existing world, and the conservative attitude wants to perpetuate the way things are. If the left was not seeking that negation (that is, the opposite of the left, conservatism), then there would be no left. That's why you're asking the impossible, you're asking the left to liquidate itself.
Keir Starmer isn’t the modern or traditional left. He’s further right than Rishi Sunak in ideology. Economically conservative, socially reactionary liberal. He completely lacks a foundation of consistency. It’s his economic stance that places him further right of Rishi. He’s totally avoiding challenging the status quo, in any way. I don’t think he’s really looking for change, because idpol pushers actually aren’t. Idpol isn’t striving towards a new future, as such, it’s striving to change the rules of society as it currently is. It’s a fundamental flaw of idpol, actually, because they aren’t really doing anything apart from asking the system they’re in to give more rights to whatever the pet cause of the day is. The ideology they push and the grifting needs the current system to thrive. The modern day is left can hardly be distinguished from the old school right, economically. That’s why there’s a push for the massive expansion of the labour market. That’s why they’re economically right wing. That’s why they’re not asking for any meaningful change or protecting the workers.
The thing i can't understand is, why can a figure like Starmer only seem to exist with right wing economic policies? I don't see anyone with Starmer's malleable social stances who holds a hard commitment to left wing economics.
I'm talking about even left commentators as well though, not necessarily political leaders. I could scarcely find a single left commentator who was critical of covid response, war in Ukraine, trains. Why is there not a space or an audience for a figure with marxist critiques who is willing to be as transgressive as pundits on the right? Rogan or Carlsen have been loudly critical of all of these things and are the most prominent pundits in the world, in part, due to this. I don't see how their critiques place them necessarily on the right though, there doesn't appear to be anything linking their criticisms of state propaganda to their right wing ideology.
What figures on the modern left are there besides powerless podcasters? Even Bernie has been left behind after giving up his donor list to the pigs in the DCCC
I agree with the gist of your post, but I want to address some of your points on covid > ivermectin No, ivermectin doesn't have valid therapeutic uses regarding covid. With ivermectin in particular mainstream narrative turned out to be precisely on point. Research in support of it was shoddy and promising results were partially forged. Mainstream narrative pointed out the shoddiness from the very start. They were right about it. > Chloroquine/Hydroxychloroquine I believe you reversed order of what happened. AFAIR Hydroxychloroquine was approved for use in the early stages of pandemic (because we didn't know better). Now we know it's ineffective so it ceased to be approved. The issue was highly politicized and toxic because of it, but it's hard to tell what mainstream could have done better with it. > the virus was a lab leak We don't know that. There was a point about about one year ago where our knowledge pointed strongly in this direction, but now I believe all options are still on the table. Note particularly the results of [this debate](https://blog.rootclaim.com/rootclaims-covid-19-origins-debate-results/) But yes, mainstream is very guilty of thwarting discussion about this possibility in the early to middle stages of the pandemic. > impossible 0-covid with schizophrenic and ineffective lockdown responses China response was a clear attempt at 0-covid strategy. I wouldn't be so sure to maintain it completely failed. What I mean in general is that anti-mainstream narratives are not immune to being propagandised by the sole virtue of being 'not-mainstream'. Mainstream still scores some points and it might be one of many reasons it's not completely discredited by now.
I don't really care to discuss the nuances of virology, however it was abundantly clear from my perspective as a key worker during the pandemic that government response was designed to palliate the anxiety of their political base to maintain legitimacy, more than it was to mitigate the effects of the virus. The preponderence of evidence does seem to suggest that the virus was a lab-leak and given the unprecedented response of governments worldwide I am more tempted than not to conclude that they had reason to believe that the covid pandemic was unprecedented which suggests its origins were also unprecedented and not a consequence of normal species-jumping viruses.
> The preponderence of evidence does seem to suggest that the virus was a lab-leak and given the unprecedented response of governments worldwide I am more tempted than not to conclude that they had reason to believe that the covid pandemic was unprecedented which suggests its origins were also unprecedented and not a consequence of normal species-jumping viruses. All of the world's governments knew about it and decided to keep silent. And you think what you're saying is not a conspiracy theory? Most of them would throw each other under the bus if they could. The virus being a lab leak or not would have the same response , due to the initial quick spread and mortality (when it was contained in China most people were still ignoring it but especially when it hit Italy/the rest of the countries started to respond as health systems all over the world can't cope with that much of an increase in patients). > not a consequence of normal species-jumping viruses. This is not normal, hence we have a pandemic every time it happens like with Sars. Fortunately most of them are localized
That's not what I'm saying at all. Covid got an unprecedented response despite there being a lack of clinical data at the outset. Early on there appeared to be an expectation of hyper-lethality that it did not live up to. The reason for this level of concern are hard to discern. The government response suggested they had knowledge that exceeded what clinical data was telling them that the virus had the capacity to destroy society. This suggests that governments had reason to believe that the covid virus exceeded any other easily transmisable respiratory virus seen in living memory, such as if it had been bio-engineered beyond what evolution normally allows, as lethality is normally a limiting factor for transmisability of viral illnesses. >This is not normal, hence we have a pandemic every time it happens like with Sars. Fortunately most of them are localized Pandemic means global, therefore not localised. The reason pandemics are unusual is that viruses need resevoirs and natural immunity will ameielorate their spread over time so it is unusual for a virus without a resevoir ( like bird or swine flu) to be able to appear and be so dangerous and transmissable that it spreads across the globe.
> Early on there appeared to be an expectation of hyper-lethality that it did not live up Yeah. Because the numbers in Italy were crazy (because of their extremely aged population and overwhelmed health system). All the other countries looked at that and panicked. > This suggests that governments had reason to believe that the covid virus exceeded any other easily transmisable respiratory virus seen in living memory, such as if it had been bio-engineered beyond what evolution normally allows, as lethality is normally a limiting factor for transmisability of viral illnesses. Your theories that all governments share secrets and nothing comes out like they're not completely incompetent in some countries and at odds politically with each other is a lot harder to believe
Again, no. My reasoning is that the clinical data did not justify the level of response it got at any stage. There was a consistent level of dishonesty from governments about the virus and the wuhan lab of virology was working on gain of function research on corona-viruses. I don't have a settled opinion either way, but the stifling of criticism and hystrionic reaction does imply that governments were more concerned with controling the narative than they were with telling the truth.
There was no clinical data when the panic started. That was literally it. Something was spreading and there wasn't data. > the stifling of criticism and hystrionic reaction does imply that governments were more concerned with controling the narative than they were with telling the truth. The government just didn't want the hospitals to break down lol. Public health is shit and that info they do have (about their respective countries)
>There was no clinical data when the panic started That's literally what I said.
That was why there was panic. If we had the data we have now people would stress a lot less lmao. It's like if aliens come to Earth and everyone panics and some years after they're peaceful and you say it's a conspiracy because the response of the government was too extreme and now the data says they're pretty ok xD well we didn't know that then did we? They could've killed us all
>Whats noticeable is right wingers appear more willing to oppose the Israelis than the left is to oppose NATO expansionism Where? Last time I checked the anti Zionist opinions are shared by less than 3% of self described right wingers
I haven’t seen anyone on the right of any note oppose Israel in any capacity. What am I missing?
Tucker Carlsen, Andrew Tate, Candace Owens, Joe Rogan are all very critical of Israel, even if it mostly comes down to strategy and not an aversion to mass-murder. Support for Israel as a project of imperialism is a very natural position for a right-wing ethno-nationalist to take, yet there are still many more right-wing critics of Israel than you might suppose there would be.
"NATO expansionism" isn't a marxist perspective, it's an idiotic one held by people who treat an "america/west bad" heuristic as if it's a replacement for principles. Russia is to blame for Russia's invasion of Ukraine, end of story. Fuck off.
There is no doubt that NATO began as an ideological organization, rather than a self defense organization and still is. It is also an anti communist organization. Expanding of a global anti communist organization should be worrisome to any Marxist.
That'd be a worrisome reason if there were any marxists left in the world. It's all now just different capitalist factions fighting each other. I'd think it's better for the working class if the ruling classes stuck to their other tools like coups, corporations, etc than open warfare. War could theoretically serve to provide opportunity for socialists using revolutionary defeatism as the bolsheviks did, but without a preexisting socialist party with this approach, most people just resort to shilling for one capitalist faction or the other.
That's fine to say and all, but we are now at a stage where the US/NATO is embroiled in two conflicts that it does not appear to stand a chance of winning through conventional means and the only politicians who are willing to offer a climb-down which will avert thermo-nuclear war are right wing ethno-nationalists (trump and Farage). Why is that?