'Liberals'/'Leftists' in America

[Elvis]

It's bizarre how many people decry the Democratic party's abandonment of progressive policies—a real problem—but also consistently attack progressive policies.

[Belligerent Savant]

Linda
@turtledumplin

Our side lost because of the intolerance of the ‘tolerant left’. If you don’t see that, then we will keep losing.
People didn’t vote for Trump, they voted against you.
They voted against your “if you don’t agree with me then you’re my enemy” mentality.
They voted against your need to have an echo chamber or risk being canceled.
They voted against being attacked for a difference in opinion.
They voted against being called pedos, racists, homophobes, Nazis simply for disagreeing with you.
They voted for the right to keep YOU out of decisions for their children.
They voted against having to walk on eggshells for fear of offending someone.

I don’t care who I piss off by saying this, step out of the tunnel vision and have a civil conversation with folks and take responsibility for your part in pushing people, who are on the fence, to vote against you.

10:42 AM · Nov 7, 2024
·
6.8M Views
…
Linda
@turtledumplin
·
And here come the ‘tolerant left’ to prove my point.
…

Linda
@turtledumplin
·
My Trump supporting friends didn’t abandon me because I voted left.

My friends on the left abandoned me for having Trump supporting friends.
…

Linda
@turtledumplin
·
No one wants to call it out because take a look at my comment sections from some of the left. they’re just comfortable being an echo chamber and don’t want to self reflect and take accountability.

https://x.com/turtledumplin/status/1854565000394031318

[DrEvil]

People didn’t vote for Trump, they voted against you.
They voted against your “if you don’t agree with me then you’re my enemy” mentality.
They voted against your need to have an echo chamber or risk being canceled.
They voted against being attacked for a difference in opinion.
They voted against being called pedos, racists, homophobes, Nazis simply for disagreeing with you.
They voted for the right to keep YOU out of decisions for their children.
They voted against having to walk on eggshells for fear of offending someone.

You do realize this is textbook Trump and GOP rhetoric too, right? Goose, meet gander.

[Belligerent Savant]

.
Not sure what bubble you live in. Keep getting your info from Reddit and the like while living in a country far removed from America.

Anyone without dependents that does NOT live in the U.S. has no finger on the pulse on the cultural mindset of millions of Americans.

Interesting that quite a few of the remaining posters here are -- and correct me if I'm wrong -- single and/or without dependents, and perhaps also without jobs or employment that requires too much rigorous daily work or extended hours (and also. they are older/middle-aged white Males). And not too surprisingly, most if not all of those that fit this criteria were totally fine with much of the affronts of the last few years (since 2020), or at least, they certainly didn't counter policies, didn't vocally raise any concerns, and/or were fully compliant. In many respects: Cowards, detached from much accountability, investment or responsibility.

[Belligerent Savant]

.

Maher is on Cable TV so none of his takes are truly controversial, and of course they primarily perpetuate/further promote mainstream tropes Re: U.S. politics, but nonetheless he (or his writers) occasionally make salient observations (at least when it comes to much of the mid-brow rhetoric of the typical consumer):

@VigilantFox

Bill Maher Knocks Some Sense Into Liberals Who Can’t See Why They Lost the Election

“...a lot of people texted me things like, ‘Well, you know, you can’t fix stupid.’ Sorry, that doesn’t work with me. Yeah, you’re stupid because you’re not thinking about the bigger picture. You’re not thinking about, maybe we did something wrong. Maybe we’re not perfect.”

“It’s like a relationship. You got dumped. America dumped you. And they’re all like, ‘You don’t know what you had.’ Yes, they do. They know what they had. And what they’re saying is, ‘We know what we had, and you’re a mess.’”

[Video Clip at Link]

https://x.com/VigilantFox/status/1855094509610451113

[Belligerent Savant]

@cliftonaduncan

In 2020 they dictated that businesses, churches and schools stay closed; they dictated who and how many you could visit; dictated that you inform on neighbors; dictated that seniors die alone in care homes; dictated that you cover your face; dictated what you inject into your body.

If you dared protest they said "screw your freedumb," and dictated that you become a second-class citizen.

...but it's YOU who is the fascist.

4:24 PM · Nov 13, 2024

https://x.com/cliftonaduncan/status/1856810309077319898

[stickdog99]

Democrats are widely sharing this link. It's as if they are competing to see who can double down on their winning strategy of shaming Trump voters most spitefully.

There has been a very disturbing trend on both sides of the QAnon vs. BlueAnon cultural/personality divide toward pretending that picking one shade of war mongering, genocide cheering, dying empire flailing, institution hollowing, oligopoly supporting, inflation accelerating, citizen spying, basic healthcare denying, and lower and middle class crushing uniparty purple over the other is the one and only thing that defines whether you are at heart a good person or a bad person.

It appears that their master plan for getting off scot-free even as they actively cash out by turning the USA into a third world country is to make the peasants with the pitchforks believe that the peasants with the torches are their mortal enemies.

And, of course, it is easy for me to say this as a straight white male. One side does pay lip service to protecting other identities while the other blows the dog whistle. But I can't help but note how personalized both the anti-Trump (and anti-Putin) hatred has become for the BlueAnon faithful.

It's as if the TDS sufferers would rather commit suicide than suffer the presence of anyone who dared to vote against the corrupt and inept reigning establishment.

It's the same mentality that lost the Democrats this election, made the last election far closer than it should have been, and made all "good Democrats" blame Russia or anything other than their own party for Hillary's shocking loss to a bloviating game show huckster. And because good Democrats would rather do ANYTHING other than self-reflect and learn from their mistakes, most good Democrats are currently doubling down by "othering" their next door neighbors into their worst enemies merely because they dared to vote against a reigning establishment that we all agree is at heart corrupt and inept.

Instead of finally getting the picture that a large percentage of voters are so sick of the status quo and having to parrot the exact same dogma about every single issue to be considered an acceptable member of the professional managerial class that the Democratic party is now exclusively appealing to that these voters are even willing to vote for convicted felon bully like Trump, Democrats are doubling down on debasing all the people who don't share each and every "good Democrat" approved political belief that they haven't already alienated.

Whatever happened to at least pretending that you are willing to listen to and respect those who disagree with even one of the long list of political stances that Democrats now use to litmus test the so-called deplorables? Instead, good Democrats have been trained by their misleaders to characterize any disagreement from their dogmatic litmus tests as "misinformation" and to demand authoritarian censorship to squash this "compromised" misinformation. How many times have those demanding authoritarian censorship and the legal prosecution of their perceived political enemies been on the right side of history?

Note that I am not saying all of this because I secretly love Trump but because I know that the working class people who desperately voted for economic change for the better are unfortunately going to get change for the worse: https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/wall ... ming-trump

And while I am citing Matt Stoller, here are his words from 2014, which could have been written yesterday.

There is no end to the whining from Democratic activists after a rotten election, and no end to finger pointing after legislative defeats on contentious questions. This story in the Washington Post is the tell-all of the 2014 wipe-out, featuring the standard recriminations between the President and Congress. In it, the chief of staff of the Senator Majority Leader Harry Reid, David Krone, attacks the White House. “We were never going to get on the same page… We were beating our heads against the wall.” The litany of excuses is long. Democratic candidates were arrogant. The White House failed to transfer money, or stump effectively. The GOP caught up in the technology race, or the GOP recruited excellent disciplined candidates.

Everything is put on the table, except the main course — policy. Did the Democrats run the government well? Are the lives of voters better? Are you as a political party credible when you say you’ll do something?

This question is never asked, because Democratic elites — ensconced in the law firms, foundations, banks, and media executive suites where the real decisions are made — basically agree with each other about organizing governance around the needs of high technology and high finance. The only time the question even comes up now is in an inverted corroded form, when a liberal activist gnashes his or her teeth and wonders — why can’t Democrats run elections around populist themes and policies? This is still the wrong question, because it assumes the wrong causality. Parties don’t poll for good ideas, run races on them, and then govern. They have ideas, poll to find out how to sell those ideas, and run races and recruit candidates based on the polling. It’s ideas first, then the sales pitch. If the sales pitch is bad, it’s often the best of what can be made of an unpopular stew of ideas.

Still, you’d think that someone, somewhere would have populist ideas. And a few — like Zephyr Teachout and Elizabeth Warren — do. But why does every other candidate not? I don’t actually know, but a book just came out that might answer this question. The theory in this book is simple. The current generation of Democratic policymakers were organized and put in power by people that don’t think that a renewed populist agenda centered on antagonism towards centralized economic power is a good idea.

The book, however, is not written by a populist liberal reformer. It’s written by one of the guys who put the current system in place. And it’s a really good and important story. The New Democrats and the Return to Power is the book, and Al From is the man who wrote it. From was one of the key organizers of this anti-populist movement, and he lays out his in detail his multi-decade organizing strategy and his reasons for what he did.

Now, of course it’s an exaggeration to say that Al From created the culture of the governing class in the modern Democratic Party. But not by much. Don’t take it from me, take it from Bill Clinton. In 2000, at Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt’s Hyde Park residence, Clinton said of From, “It would be hard to think of a single American citizen who, as a private citizen, has had a more positive impact on the progress of American life in the last 25 years than Al From.” Clinton overdoes the rhetoric sometimes, but not in this case. From helped put Clinton in the White House.

...

[stickdog99]

https://cafeamericainmag.com/what-i-lea ... y-leaving/

...

I began my career as a socialist-feminist podcaster and journalist in around 2010, and was almost immediately on the outs with the majority of my would-be allies. My criticisms of prostitution, pornography, burlesque (a thing forced upon us at every turn in Vancouver’s burgeoning hipster/dive bar scene), drag, and third wave feminism put me at odds with not just the popular “sex work is work” crowd of feminists and leftists, but with the party I’d long devoted myself to, Canada’s New Democratic Party (NDP).

By the time gender ideology appeared on the scene, I was already accustomed to near-constant attempts to shut me up, though even those hadn’t prepared me for the mass cancellation campaign launched against me in 2015, when leftists and feminists across Canada petitioned to have me fired from my job as a part-time editor at rabble.ca, a Canadian leftist platform that had hosted my writing and podcasts for years. The petitioners didn’t succeed, as my higher-ups were unable to locate any particular crime that could justify firing me, but my co-workers stopped speaking to me and trashed me online. I nearly had a total emotional breakdown watching this campaign play out online and experiencing ostracization behind the scenes, while I was ordered by my bosses to say nothing publicly in my defense.

The country-wide petition and months-long online campaign, using the moniker #DropMM, to have me fired from my job at rabble accused me of abstruse political crimes such as “suggesting older women cannot be active sex workers”, using the term “illegal immigrants”, being “a white, cis, non sex-working person who writes with contempt about communities that [I am] not a member of”, and of course “racism, whorephobia and transmisogyny”.

Though I had been advocating for women-only space for years prior, it was the advent of Bill C-16, Canada’s gender identity legislation, tabled in 2016 and passed in 2017, that led to my permanent departure from the left, and left me endangered and further ostracized in my own city. There were certain neighbourhoods and bars I was afraid to frequent alone, fearing attack. Nonetheless, all I’d endured as a wrongthinker had thickened my skin, and I became evermore devoted to speaking unpopular truths, even alone.

Many say, “I didn’t leave the left, the left left me”, but I really did leave the left. I didn’t leave my political tribe on account of bitterness, but because I no longer wanted to be part of a cult where independent thought was stifled and punished. I had struggled from the get-go to be not only an independent writer and media producer, but an independent thinker, and when I finally began to realize this was not what the left wanted, I accepted that and moved on.

Our country of progressives and feminists imagined themselves as dissidents, but hated dissidence. They saw free speech as dangerous. Dissent from the agreed upon narratives was a threat to the comfortable smugness the left had attached to their assumption that they held the most right, kind, open-minded, inclusive, diverse worldview. Being progressive no longer was about politics or policy so much as it was about identity, and no one wanted their identities challenged. This was why those who stepped out of line had to be ousted and tarred as traitors, rather than understood. After all, if one understood, one might have to change one’s minds, threatening the tribe and identity. How could the left be the most good and right if the other side also held valid ideas?

I was particularly vexing for the Canadian media and left, as I couldn’t be labelled a “far right misogynist” the way Jordan Peterson was, nor could I be dismissed as member of the religious right, and so be easily categorized as an enemy to all that is good, right, inclusive, and diverse. How dared I, a feminist and socialist, speak out against gender ideology—in defense of women, at that?

I also suggested that Black Lives Matter was a ridiculous protest movement in a Canadian context, that there was no genuine “far right nationalist” movement in Canada, nor any powerful contingent of white supremacists. I defended the free speech of those deemed racist and refused to denounce those I was ordered to.

By the time Covid rolled around in 2020, I had already begun looking for an escape to America, land of the free, and as far as I could tell, of the more interesting.

The problems I had begun to observe in Canadians became glaring upon declaration of a “pandemic”. In lockstep, Canadians stayed inside, took their medicine, masked up, and squealed on their neighbours for having grandma over for Christmas dinner.

Had Canada always been like this or had something changed? Was it them or was it me?

The Trudeau government’s censorship of Canadians who dissented was intensifying, and I worried I would no longer be able to work, or worse would end up in jail for “hate speech”. Trudeau was seeking to pass online hate speech bills, which I knew would target people like me first. We were being warned the border would be closed soon; vaccine mandates were looming; and flights out of the country were being cancelled. I bought a plane ticket to Mexico, thinking maybe I’d return when things improved. They did not improve. They worsened.

At this point I had been visiting Sayulita for many years as a tourist. I had come on my own a couple of times, and made friends. Whenever I returned I felt a sense of peace, comfort, and happiness that contrasted with the stomach-tightening anxiety I’d begun to suffer every time I returned to Vancouver after having been away for talks and events in other countries. What drew me to this little Mexican town was in part its lawlessness, and I was thrilled to find this had extended into the Covid response.

Progressive Canada is a country of passive aggressives: we are so kind and caring — so polite that we won’t tell you to your face that you’ve upset us, but will unfriend you on Facebook and tell our friends, in order to ensure one’s commitment to the cult is unquestioned.

As I crept further away from the status quo, the attacks got worse. I was among just a few to speak out against Bill C-16, which led me to be invited by a Conservative senator to testify against the bill that drove us full speed ahead into the clown country known today as Tranada.

The day I arrived, I felt a sense of elation I hadn’t experienced in ages — everything was normal. There was no lockdown, no masking, no obsessive talk about vaccines and which one would you get and how soon. People were dancing, singing, drinking, sharing food and cigarettes anything else you might imagine — happily and without a care in the world. And everything was fine. There had been a brief period of lockdown in the late spring and summer, I was told, but by the time I arrived in January 2021, all that had been abandoned — the loss of income and business had hit hard. It wasn’t worth it.

Many people I met there were like me—North Americans and Europeans who couldn’t believe what was happening in their cities and towns on account of a cold. They were freaked out by the attempt to crackdown on freedoms and constitutional rights, but remained defiant, unwilling to surrender their liberties for what seemed like a money grab and a test to see how far we could be pushed.

Besides that though, most of us didn’t talk much about politics. My friends were my friends without knowing much about what I thought about anything or even what I did for work. Who you voted for and why seemed irrelevant. We just liked hanging out together.

Having come from a place like Vancouver, where everything was politics, and it was the norm to cut people out who were Trump supporters or anti-vaxxers or Jordan Peterson fans, I was so relieved to not have to explain myself to people demanding to know why I was mean to “trans people” or “hated sex workers” while I was trying to have fun at the bar.

The way Mexico differs from Canada extends beyond the lawlessness, though of course that is an appealing factor to someone like me, who values the risk attached to freedom, as well as the chaos of a place that can’t be Karened into submission by uptight people grown so accustomed to their routines that any bump in the road demands a call to the manager.

While the ninnies of Vancouver continued their social distancing, followed arrows around grocery stores, pretended to have whatever they could recall of “fun” during Zoom cocktail hours, mainlining algorithmic Facebook slop and pornography (indeed, Pornhub thrived during the Covid years, jumping on the opportunity to encourage men to “stay safe” by masturbating to women and girls who most definitely were not), the rest of us went on with life.

One thing that turned me off of Vancouver, beyond its elite, out-of-touch politics, was the disappearance of community. No one seemed to care much about maintaining relationships, celebration, tradition, or fun. They cared a lot about comfort, which translated into control. They wanted to know where they were going, who was going to be there — would it be worth it, really, to put on pants and leave the house, when the comforts of their condos and Netflix were right there?

It felt as though everyone gave up on life after 30. There was no spontaneity, no adventure, no risk, #nonewfriends. Only comfort zones. I didn’t want to give up on life. I wanted to learn and experience new things, meet new people, take risks, have adventures, and fun. The fact I would choose, in a way so few understood, to risk my social status, my safety, my financial security, my comfort, simply to be able to say “men aren’t women”, spoke to that.
But that risk — including the financial and personal uncertainty that came with choosing to be an independent writer — served me well, allowing me the freedom and will to leave Canada. I was poorer, but in a better position to find happiness than my friends who felt chained to a lifestyle I was not part of.

Canadians tend to think of Mexico as either a danger zone or a resort where they’ll be handed frozen margaritas in a pool while a group of men in sombreros serenade them. And of course it is those things, in places, but much more. It’s perfect, to me, in its imperfections and weirdness and slowness. Nothing ever works as it should and little happens when it’s supposed to. Everything is negotiable and you have to be smart and savvy, or you will get ripped off or maybe worse. There’s no authority to complain to if you don’t like dog shit on the sidewalk or the workers playing banda outside your window all day.

Honestly, you’d hate it. Don’t come.

What I learned about Canada became ever more pronounced upon leaving. Every time I return I’m astounded at how lifeless people seem, going from point A to point B in their new EVs, from yoga to their condos, and to their lifeline, the internet. They don’t know what they’re missing because they think they have it all. They know everything they need to know about the world — the CBC told them — why go out and experience it firsthand?

They know MAGAs are bad, Hamas is good, the world is on fire, and that jab saved lives, what are you, a conspiracy theorist? No, I’m a human. Living life with a bunch of other humans who are very different from me, and who are joyful despite having few of the luxuries middle class Canadians take for granted, and little control over their surroundings. They have community and family and music and food and drinks and parties and fun. Who cares who got vaxxed?

What I learned by leaving Canada and living a much more inconvenient, but in some ways simpler, life is that I am happier and freer than almost everyone I know in Canada. I own little, don’t have access to all the new gadgets, tech, and appliances, and make much less than most of my friends in Canada do, yet so many of them—among the nominally most privileged people in the world—seem purposeless, lifeless, bored, anxious, and depressed.

Marcus Aurelius famously wrote that “it takes very little to live a fulfilled and happy life”, but Canadians have utterly lost sight of this.

I’ll take the dust, the storms, the power outages, the poor plumbing, the noise, the smells, the unpredictability of everything, over the comfort of a cage. I can be grateful to Covid for one thing—it pushed me to further commit to freedom, and to a better life.

[Belligerent Savant]

^^^^^
Salient/astute observations by someone from the historical ‘left’.

——

I’ll take the dust, the storms, the power outages, the poor plumbing, the noise, the smells, the unpredictability of everything, over the comfort of a cage. I can be grateful to Covid for one thing—it pushed me to further commit to freedom, and to a better life.

Indeed.

[Belligerent Savant]

Slothrop
@gnocchiwizard

anyone screeching about abuse of government power right now should have to state whether or not they were on board when the state tried to compel all citizens to receive an experimental medical treatment or lose their jobs.

people don't like to talk about it much anymore but this just happened a few years ago
…

G-Study
@giannmi

They sure don't and it is fascinating in a very dark way. A friend is hysterically anti-Trump and I tried to explain in great detail how there are a great many people that are not necessarily "pro trump" but were horrified by the Biden regime and the tyranny it implemented with respect to covid policies. I was one of them and articulated how I was literally facing the prospect of taking a shot I didn't want nor need in order to provide for my family. 30 years of a career on the precipice and the uprooting of my and my family's entire life, all for a lie about a shot and a lie knowingly told by the people in our government.

He was completely unfazed and continued his rantings about Trump allegedly "taking away rights!"

Peoples' brains are broken and I do not see a way back from this.
…
Jeremias, o foradalei
@Peyto___

I’ve always knew this silence would happen, after it became clear how stupid all that was.
Kind of a dissociation as trauma response.
They know and feel ashamed, even if they pretend not to.
Anyway, we’re on tribal mode, reason does not play a part in most issues anymore.

https://x.com/gnocchiwizard/status/1889356655554400352