What do you believe that most people of your political creed don't?
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Ima be honest. I just don’t fuck with pronouns. I’ll typically use they even if I know what their preferred ones are. That or whatever feels better for what I’m talking about.
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Sure, if you fall out with a group, you might end up shifting your views when a new group you join sees things slightly differently. Lots of progressive groups fight and argue with each other over the specifics, and it often gets quite heated. But that's not the same thing as radically shifting your moral compass to point in another direction altogether.
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I was going to follow up with a sick zinger but instead I'll just be normal, ha.
It is important to grow the left, to turn it from like 100-1000 people in a given city into 5-10%. I can agree with that motivation, as can the vast majority of socialists. Our aim is revolution, that doesn't happen from just a few reading groups, it has to become more.
The entire country already caters to the demo you mentioned. Everything is ready-made for them. Many orgs are dominated by them, such as the DSA. You should not write off straight white cis guys but they are consistently the hardest to reach because they are dismissive of others' experiences with oppression and have been more shielded from capitalism's worst in their country, but tend to feel very entitled to an opinion about it.
Centrism is the only described characteristic that is a chosen identity and it is a political tendency, if you can call it that. It's a person with no political development whatsoever, they just vaguely cobble together an incoherent mishmash of common liberal and reactionary ideas that they can't really defend but they call themselves an outsider as if that means something regarding someone whose political life can be summed up as, "sometimes votes".
So what would it mean to try to boost efforts to recruit straight white cis dude centrists? Because the first things that would come to mind for me are usually called tailism by socialists and has a long track record of failure in the US in particular, where the US had a gargantuan labor movement that was entirely scuttled by liberal cooption and playing straight white cis dudes off of marginalized groups. There were entire unions that were segregated or disallowed black membership, for example. Those were the easiest to coopt into the red scare and, once they were used to out and isolate socialists, were then easily undermined and shrunk when their anticommunist government came for labor a couple decades later, having no radical core remsining and no material leverage.
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Well that's what I mean by doing more harm than good. People notice, and then say "I hate whatever those people stand for".
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Wanting less/more immigration are both perfectly valid positions.
Immigration can provide opportunities to a country but can also cause issues and it's undemocratic and dangerous to demonize either position on the issue.
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The settler mindset is taught to basically every American either through school or wider social conditioning. It is an ongoing challenge to left organizing and has to be unlearned so that one can take liberating actions rather than explicitly oppositional settler ones. It is a mixture of white supremacy, colonial chauvinism, national chauvinism and myth-making, and some other reactionary ingredients that many have trouble observing because they are so normalized. And indigenous people can have this same mindset to varying degrees just like a black American can internalize anti-black racism.
The core precepts taught about US history are fundamentally a lie to benefit this mindset. As Marx said, the tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. A bit of seemingly harmless Americana like [fruit] picking, a little farmhouse that sells [fruit]-based goods. Well, about 100-200 years ago you can usually bet that land was native. Not much folksy history to draw on. Not much tradition, aside from what was imported and normalized by waves of settlers for which whiteness was invented by ruling class interests to mollify the newly white people and further exploit everyone else. An identity that rationalized the theft of that land, of "settling" it for the imported culture's definition of stewardship, of extraction for [fruit]. The history of that place is told as a "family farm for 7 generations". Its crop is picked by underpaid workers, many of them undocumented: the labor underclass established for the modern settler mindset. Wage slaves and sometimes actual slaves, something considered perfectly normal in the settler mindset. An actual horror and overt injustice often just a few meters away and yet everyone is not up in arms demanding equal treatment. Instead, they respond to the ruling class' demands to blame the marginalized for the bourgeoisie's harms, they call for cruelty and deportation or they call for the status quo in response. Rarely do they call for liberation or equal treatment. The idea of open borders is used by the far far right to ridicule the far right that also wants closed borders. The idea itself is considered absurd by the mainstream settler mindset, as they are told it is absurd because it is against settler interests. "Imagine having to make just as little money as a Spanish-speaking brown person!", they internalize. They pick the [fruit] by the pretty white farmhouse and talk about how nice it would be to own their own place just like this. So long as they eventually own a house - or believe they will - they tend to not organically question the system that benefits them, surrounded by a system that discourages or coopts such thinking.
It is a potent force to overcome and it is why a full socialist education in The West takes so long. So much to unlearn. So many potential pitfalls. So many places where you are basically asking a person to have empathy for others and not interpret this as a form of self-hatred and get all defensive. Because to understand US-based oppression is to hate it. To be revolted. To reject all forms of settler thought as best you can, as you refuse to ever intentionally celebrate genocide or chattel slavery or the crushing of entire nations' simple dreams of sovereignty, food security, intact families, and limbs.
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The person on my left whispers about equality, and the benefits of social safety nets. The person on my right yells lies that equality means I have to give up things, and that social safety nets will be abused by people who want to steal the fruits of my labor. The person behind me (financially) says nothing, they’re too busy just trying to live. The person ahead of me points to the person behind getting food stamps and screams “how dare they take your taxes” while they quietly steal the actual fruit of my labor.
Any time leftism gets loud enough to get enough attention to appeal to anyone, rightism is already loudly complaining about the noise. If one doesn’t think about it too much, all they’ve heard is negativity about the left and positivity about the right. Call it brainwashing, gaslighting, or indoctrination, but rarely do the facts of both sides come to play. You have to work to find the truth of leftism while also working to ignore the bullshit being screamed from the right.
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I would agree. Both are just a standard Hero's Journey where they build a team and increase their power to then resolve the major conflict. And both use East Asian culture essentially as a fantasy element to entertain a Western audience in a relatively respectful way. Most audience members don't get most of the references because they aren't familiar with the narratives or traditions to which they are referring. They just understand it as "other" and don't see a deeper meaning. In that sense they are both somewhat exploitative, though these examples are very far down on my list of grievances against capitalist entertainment media.
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So I basically agree with you, semantically, about the problem that needs to be solved. I just think it's not a good idea to call non-indigenous people "settlers" in general. For one thing, it doesn't fit the literal meaning of the word settler (somebody who comes from away to settle down), since most so-called settlers have never moved to a different country in their whole lives. For two, it causes a knee-jerk reaction to those who are called settlers. It's just not productive to call people settlers in most cases. I don't mean to say settler-colonialism isn't a useful concept or doesn't exist -- I just mean specifically that the word "settler" applied to individuals is a bad idea in most cases.
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Humans aren't going to evolve towards intelligence. We're a pretty short-sighted stupid species. We're going to continue to devolve and kill ourselves off, one way or another.
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It depends on how large the negative impact of the person or organization because of their view is or how much negative impact it would have on me to boycott it. Like I won’t ever buy a Tesla because Musk is doing a lot of harm to people and should not get a single cent from me but I don’t really care the new Linkin Park singer is or was a scientologist. I won’t buy Nestle products and it’s surprisingly easy to do as there are enough alternatives. But as much as I would like to drop Whatsapp because Meta sucks, it’s simply the main communication service here in Germany.
I think you’ve got to draw some lines and stand by them but you don’t need be 100% Jesus either.
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Sometimes people are that rabid they need to be removed from existence
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I don't do it either, but i'm an older queer so i see it as painting a target on my back.
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It seems like the atmosphere is changing now but I've been saying this for years.
The language of privilege is backwards and counter productive.
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That intellectual property, both copyright or patents, doesn't serve its theoretical purpose and just acts as a legal shield for the monopolies of big corporations, at least in our capitalistic system, and it limits the spread of information
In theory, a musician should be protected against abuse of their music. In practice, all musicians need to be on Spotify through one of the few main publishers to make any decent money, and their music will be used for unintended purposes (intended for their contract at least) like AI training
In theory, patents should allow a small company with an idea to sell its progressive product to many big corporations. In practice, one big corporation will either buy the small company or copy the product and have the money to legally support its case against all evidence, lobbying to change laws too. Not to mention that big corporations are the ones that can do enough research to have relevant patents, it's much harder for universities and SMEs, not to mention big corporations can lobby to reduce public funding to R&D programs in universities and for SMEs.
And, last but not least important, access to content, think of politically relevant movies or book, depends on your income. If you are from a poorer country, chances are you cannot enjoy as much information and content as one born in a richer country.
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The settler mindset has long outlived the immediate settler colonists that were genociding the natives or otherwise assisting it by stealing land (with extra steps). Nobody who uses the term has that meaning. We are referring to the settler colonial psychology that persists, and particularly its US version that is merged with white supremacy and national chauvinism.
You can also recognize it in other Euro settler colonists like the Afrikaners and "Israelis". They tell the same stories about deserving the land, of doing a better job with it, of blaming the colonized for fighting back or "bringing up the past", they seed conversations with racial supremacist implications and sometimes just overt racism. Are cowboys the good guys? Is it cool to be a cowboy? If you picture a cowboy in your head, are they a white guy? Most cowboys were brown and a substantial minority were black. American settler psychology has in some ways moved beyond those examples, however, as the "settlement" is nearly complete so they can entertain performative actions like cynical land acknowledgements while never supporting Land Back or even just basic material improvements for natice people. They can temporarily "feel bad", but not so bad as to need to actually do anything, because the national genocide doesn't warrant doing even one tangible thing per year.
I have not gotten too deep into the material basis of the settler mindset, but it is also prevalent and the most important. The fundamental fact of free or almost free land (stolen land) led to an economic base premised on it that has been slowly closing up. It acted as a release valve for social pressures that advanced in Europe, it could create profits from essentially nothing and be a carrot dangled in front of the face of generations that told their kids and grandkids that you could just work hard and go be a farmer. Two depressions resulted from the loss of the material basis for this but not the culture, as The New Deal and associated red scare then coincided with the US firmly taking over as prime imperialist, propping up the welfare of white people of settler culture via neocolonial exploitation. Pineapples on tables and virtual guarantees on jobs and cheap houses for a few generations. Not so much for black or brown people.
These are things in living memory. They color all of our experiences, ambitions, cultural references, and attitudes towards one another - and what we think we owe each other (usually nothing per this mindset).
Re: knee jerk reactions, yes of course, it is supposed to be dismissive when you call someone a settler to their face. It is usually an irrefutable fact and they don't know how to deal with it because they don't understand it. Is it always wrong to be dismissive? I think it can carry important emotional content so as to agitate others. Maybe the audience isn't the centrist settler, or is otherwise someone they think it would be a waste of time to try and convert directly. Most of the time they are going to be right about that. A "centrist" sharing their opinion already lacks humility and that's rarely the place a person can improve from.
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It's more accurate to say that I'm growing disillusioned with the movement as a whole and the people who claim allegiance with it, not its ideals. I support the ideals that I find right and just, and given limited options (votes and such), will support the people who promote those ideals.
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I agree and disagree.
I believe he doesn't actually care for anything but himself. He is racist and classist and what else. But I don't think it dictates his politics as much as you might would assume. He wants power and through his own racism, he released that "vague" racism works, but mostly the creation of the "others".
But I think his activities are deeply based in traditional republican values. That is why project 2025 exists. Republican think Tanks created it. You could argue that those aren't republican values but e.g. they pushed for a horrible school system for decades. Trump doesn't actually care about it, but he follows the plan because it aligns with government deregulation which he likes.
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The overwhelming majority of leftists I know used to be centrists at some point in their lives. Also, I'm really astonished that you openly admit that you use the word "settler" specifically to be antagonizing. I kind of thought that was the bailey, not the motte.
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I can read the book, but... I just don't understand how leftism can be successful without followers.
