'Liberals'/'Leftists' in America

[stickdog99]

[MacCruiskeen]

where were these truckers during gamergate?
how many of them are fighting for otherkin rights?
why aren't they demanding more bike lanes?
do they even care about rojava?

4:50 am. · 10. Feb. 2022

https://twitter.com/Scardanelli2/status ... 6601752580

[conniption]

Left Wing Sponsors vs Right Wing Sponsors

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Eg5Zv70j20
(3:56)

Ryan Long
• Dec 27, 2021 •
The difference between left wing sponsors and right wing sponsors and Ad Reads.

[Belligerent Savant]

How the Left betrayed the Truckers

The convoy is despised by those who should support it

BY MALCOM KYEYUNE

They call it “The Honkening”. Ottawa, Canada’s capital city, is currently being besieged by a novel kind of protest. Honkening is a fairly appropriate name for what’s going on. Thousands of truckers have driven to the capital, and barraged the city with the noise of truck horns creating a cacophony of sound. Elsewhere, on the border between the United States and Canada, truckers, farmers and cowboys have blockaded traffic.

As the protests enter another week, Ottawa’s mayor has declared a state of emergency. Jim Watson described the truckers — ostensibly protesting against Canada’s harsh Covid mandates — as “out of control”. Watson sees anarchy; the truckers fulminate against Covid authoritarianism. But this battle is really about working-class discontent.

The naive among us could be forgiven for thinking that this protest signalled something auspicious about “late capitalist” society. For decades, the common folk wisdom for both the Left and the Right was that the West’s working classes had been completely neutralised as a political force, and that class conflict itself was a relic of the past.

This idea took hold in the Sixties, when Herbert Marcuse theorised that Western workers had been subjected to a “socially engineered arrest of consciousness”. Their vested interest in the existing capitalist order made them impossible to radicalise. Ever since, finding new theoretical models to explain the unreliability (and stodgy conservatism) of workers has been a recurring activity on parts of the Left. Marxists had made a horrific discovery: the working class were not their foot soldiers. As Joan Didion once put it: “The have-nots, it turned out, mainly aspired to having.”

Many on the Left came to believe that without their corporatist union structures, and without their shop stewards and political organisers, the working classes were done for. They were little better, to paraphrase Marx, than a “sack of potatoes”.

Without proper leadership, the workers would be too inert and stupid to do anything about their plight. As such, the decades after the fall of the Soviet Union (and the defeat of the strike waves of the Eighties) saw many Leftists indulge a wistful nostalgia for a time when the workers stuck it to the powers that be. Celebration of the good old days of the Left, and of “working-class power” in general, was thus central to the aesthetics of the now completely defunct wave of Left populism in the 2010s.

With that backdrop in mind, the explosion of worker militancy over vaccine mandates — and, on a related note, high fuel taxes in Europe — ought to have been greeted by enthusiasm by the Leftist activist and organiser set. Yet nothing could be further from the truth. The truckers in Canada have instead triggered a primordial sense of dread in the hearts of the urban classes, in the people who Canadian trucker Gord Magill has dubbed “the email job caste”.

This sense of fear and dread at the machinations of the proles is hardly something unique to Canada. Indeed, even the United States saw a large increase of worker militancy and wildcat strikes over oppressive vaccine mandates. Like their compatriots in Canada, America’s various professional friends of the working class responded with horror and scorn. The well-known Marxist economist, Richard Wolff, was mobbed on Twitter for suggesting that workers striking over mandates were actually part of something called “class struggle”, rather than merely an expression of “fascism”.

Ottawa’s truckers are a symptom of the massive class divide that is opening up across the West. Marxists are sticking their heads in the sand about this generational moment, or papering it over with absurd topsy-turvy leaps. In one recent display of moon logic, the Canadian activist, writer and self-described socialist Nora Loreto complained that “labour” was invisible in the resistance to the “fascist” truckers that had occupied Ottawa. An exasperated comrade chimed in with a story of being a shop steward for a teamster (truck driver) union, and — horror of horrors — the painful truth was that many teamsters were more likely to be in the protest themselves than protesting against it.

The exchange is modern Western Leftism in a nutshell. Is there a single better illustration of the contradictions of the moment? An “activist” and organiser” recoiling in horror at a bunch of truckers — people who work in the real, material economy, ferrying the foodstuffs and goods we all depend on to survive — staging a political protest, only to then ask “but where is the organised working class in all of this?”. Isn’t it obvious to the point of parody that the workers are the people inside the trucks?

It’s easy to laugh at this sort of absurdity, but the lesson here is anything but a joke. The divorce between “the Left” and “the workers” is now complete and irrevocable. Nora Loreto may not be a person with calloused hands, and she may very well belong to Gord Magill’s “email jobs caste”. But for the longest time, the political rhetoric and worldview of the Left depended on the idea that the trucker and the activist were merely two sides of the same coin.

Without the activist and the “organiser”, the trucker would never be able to know how to organise himself and his fellows politically; without the trucker, the activist and the organiser would not have a cause for which to organise. Now it seems that the trucker — and by extension, the pilot, the garbage collector, and the bus driver — does not need or want this caste of self-appointed leaders.

This divorce has happened all over the world in recent years. After the massive rejection by Red Wall voters of Jeremy Corbyn and his activist base in the smart, urban, and highly credentialed parts of Britain, one started to see a rhetoric of open loathing for the dumb, uneducated gammons and proles. In Germany, the Left party Die Linke has endured several rounds of severe internal fighting and strife. As in the UK, the younger, more urban, more credentialed parts of the Left have fought a running battle — and thrown pies — against pro-worker “racists” such as Sahra Wagenknecht.

In Canada, that loathing has now turned into fear — and into outright hatred. The problem of the truckers is not really the honking (which the Guardian sniffily calls “crude behaviour“), because sooner or later, that honking will stop. The state of emergency will end. But the protests, significantly, have shown how confused and weak the opponents of the working classes are today.

During the pandemic lockdowns, the email jobs caste loved to talk about essential workers, and luxuriated in public displays of gratitude for them. But this caste of genteel urbanites never realised that this choice of nomenclature was in fact much more meaningful — and ominous – than they understood. Some people, it seems, simply are critical to the functioning of the economy, pandemic or no pandemic. Once those people — and truck drivers are perhaps the most critical of them all — start to demand to be listened to, they have ways to make those demands felt.

For the Left, the problem of the truckers is their newfound political independence. Nostalgia really is a thing of the past now; the dinosaurs that were thought long extinct are back now, and they are hungry. Gone are the halcyon days of dreaming about halcyon days – where serious working class militancy was just a distant myth.

The real danger of any trucker’s strike, or any pilot’s walkout, or any fuel tax protest in Europe, is that every new confrontation sets a precedent: a precedent that says that the Gord Magills are done taking orders from the Nora Letos of the world.

https://unherd.com/2022/02/how-the-left ... -truckers/

[stickdog99]

https://twitter.com/jeffreyatucker/stat ... 4830862337



Today, the entire policy platform of the left has been replaced by Pharma Über Alles. Why?

[Joe Hillshoist]

https://twitter.com/jeffreyatucker/status/1493611334830862337



Today, the entire policy platform of the left has been replaced by Pharma Über Alles. Why?

Isn't it obvious?

Those things are attempts to delegitimise actual left wing values like collective action, the withholding of labour and civil liberties. Its a form of class war.

But the left didn't particularly defend small business. This is a bullshit trope that gets inserted into the narrative to re write history.

[MacCruiskeen]

The bourgeoisie has completely shifted to the right, they have abandoned left wing politics en masse. At the same time they have sought to redefine Left "brand" as their inalienable essence, a racial or tribal character of the rich and expensively well educated. Don't help them!

https://twitter.com/RedKahina/status/14 ... 8916050951

[stickdog99]

https://nitter.net/shoe0nhead/status/14 ... 6629633025

[Harvey]

https://nitter.net/shoe0nhead/status/1494463376629633025

[stickdog99]

Thanks!

[stickdog99]

https://www.dailywire.com/news/exclusiv ... f-truckers

[stickdog99]

https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1 ... 9132093452

[Harvey]

https://www.mintpressnews.com/trudeau-canada-truckers-protest-state-of-emergency/279727/

As Trudeau Cracks Down, the Left Drives Protesters Into the Arms of the Right Once Again

Divide and rule, the cultivation of tribalism, is an insurance policy against successful dissent and the threat of revolution.

by Jonathan Cook, February 17th, 2022


OTTAWA – If you were Canada’s prime minister, what would you be prepared to do to enforce Covid restrictions on large swaths of your population? No one need ask that question any longer. Now we know the answer.

For the first time in the country’s history, Justin Trudeau has invested his office with sweeping and undemocratic powers under the 1988 Emergencies Act in a bid to stop the so-called “Truckers’ Protests” against Canada’s pandemic restrictions. But, as one might expect, Trudeau has promised to use those powers briefly and sparingly – at least, until he decides otherwise.

His government can ban protests, seize protesters’ income and property without court oversight, and effectively appropriate many millions of dollars raised by supporters on crowdfunding sites to finance the protests. That isn’t a theoretical danger. Even before the current emergency powers were invoked, the Canadian government did just that. Almost certainly under federal pressure earlier in the month, GoFundMe withheld some 10 million Canadian Dollars donated by protest supporters.

Trudeau has brought Canada as close to martial law as he dares without drafting platoons of soldiers onto the streets of Ottawa and Toronto and having the army seize control of the TV stations.

And paradoxically, he has responded to protesters, whose rallying cry is that the Canadian government is using the pretext of Covid to accrete more powers and behave undemocratically, by actually accreting more powers and behaving undemocratically. Trudeau behaves as though this will dampen down tensions. Or maybe he is simply pandering to his electoral base.

A wiser approach has been taken by Ontario’s premier, who started lifting some of the largely redundant restrictions in his province this week as a way to take the wind out of the protesters’ sails.

Draconian measures

But let us stand back from Canada’s drama for a moment and consider both the purported and actual reason for the declaration of a state of emergency – a peacetime equivalent of Canada’s earlier War Measures Act.

The truckers’ protests have been largely peaceful – at least in the sense that there have been very few arrests and relatively minor criminal damage. The protesters have caused inconvenience but only of the kind that is inevitable in any civil disobedience campaign.

Emergency powers have been invoked because the protesters have refused to disperse and because officials warn of some future scenario of potential violence – exactly the sort of accusation leveled against any unwelcome mass protest.

However, the more pressing reason is that the truckers’ actions have impeded cross-border deliveries from Canada to U.S. factories, such as car plants. That has started to have a damaging impact on the U.S. economy, and President Joe Biden has been making his view on the matter only too clear to Trudeau.

It is worth considering a comparison to see how draconian and dangerously unreasonable Trudeau is being. Over several years, protests in the U.K. by the environmental action group Extinction Rebellion have repeatedly caused similar levels of disruption – and similar levels of antipathy from sections of the British public. Protesters have blocked highways, railway lines, and airports. Some have been arrested and fined.

But despite all of this, even the right-wing government of Boris Johnson has not suggested going as far as Canada’s current state of emergency.

Pull the rug

To put the gravity of Trudeau’s decision – and the flimsiness of the justification for it – in proper perspective, consider what the Canadian prime minister needs to do to put an end to the truckers’ protests compared to what would be required of Johnson for Extinction Rebellion’s climate emergency protests to be brought to a halt.

Johnson would have to radically overhaul the entire British economy, quickly ending its reliance on fossil fuels, while abandoning his entire political ideology of individualist, dog-eat-dog capitalism and replacing it with the far more collectivist approach inherent in a Green New Deal. That is a tall order indeed. Should they spread, Extinction Rebellion’s protests really could become an emergency for Johnson.

Trudeau, on the other hand, could easily pull the rug from under the truckers’ protests – as Ontario officials are trying to do – with nothing more than a decision to relent on many of the most grating restrictions, especially mandated vaccines for some professions and the requirement on unvaccinated truckers to quarantine for 14 days on their return from the U.S.

That would not touch Trudeau’s political program. It would not cost the Canadian taxpayer a penny. It would not require a reorganization of Canadian society.

So why has he chosen this particular hill to make his stand?

Those who are still singularly focused on the dangers of Covid presumably think that Trudeau is right. But with the highly infectious and much milder omicron variant, hospitalization and death rates are plummeting worldwide, as the virus, after spreading like wildlife, starts to burn itself out.

Even if vaccine mandates are enforced, few of the unvaccinated will manage to get both doses before they are exposed to the virus and develop natural immunity anyway. Omicron has made the already dubious need for vaccine mandates and quarantines largely moot. The evidence suggests natural infection provides – for the vaccinated and unvaccinated alike – stronger and longer-term immunity of the kind the vaccines have so far failed to deliver.

Even the argument that vaccines should still be insisted upon in case omicron mutates into another nastier variant is looking decidedly weak. Infection with omicron will provide a much closer immunity match to any future variant derived from omicron than vaccines based on the now-distant original variant of Covid.

Veil of democracy

In other words, Trudeau has ostensibly chosen to grab for himself autocratic powers, undermining Canadian democracy, for the sake of a pig-headed commitment to mandate and quarantine rules that no longer fit the science or help with the pandemic. Rather than back down in the face of changing circumstances, he has invoked extreme powers to enforce those rules.

Remember, Trudeau considered, but did not invoke, the Emergencies Act when the pandemic – a genuine emergency – hit Canada at a time when the country had no tools, such as vaccines, to deal with it. Is the need to impose vaccine mandates now really more of an emergency than the need to deal with the outbreak of Covid was two years ago?

For that reason, we all ought to be deeply troubled by what Trudeau has done. He has shown how power works and whom it benefits by stripping off the veil of democracy. As a result, Canada is in a state of emergency entirely of Trudeau and Biden’s making.

‘Shock’ experiments

Those sympathetic to Trudeau’s action, or ready to turn a blind eye to it, especially on the left, have failed to absorb the lessons of Naomi Klein’s book “Shock Doctrine.”

Klein explained back in 2007 that in the post-war period, the United States military, political and economic elites had effectively carried out a series of full-spectrum “shock” experiments on developing countries, especially in Latin America. First, Washington began encouraging, financing, and arming violent coups and sponsoring military regimes like Augusto Pinochet’s in Chile, and then exploited the resulting psychological trauma and sense of dislocation among the general population.

The goal was to dissolve social solidarity and traditional ideas of fairness and graft on to a weakened, more pliable society the most predatory kind of free-market capitalism. That paved the way for newly emerging transnational corporations to commit economic rape and pillage, backed by what were already becoming neoliberalism’s global agencies, like the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.

Following the fall of the Soviet Union at the start of the 1990s, the U.S. was able to extend this approach to the former eastern bloc countries through a series of “color revolutions.” And since the early 2000s, U.S., British and Gulf-backed invasions and proxy wars – and an extinguished Arab Spring – have brought the “shock doctrine” in full force to those parts of the Middle East that have not previously submitted to U.S. hegemony.

Crisis of legitimacy

Now the danger is that the “shock doctrine” wheel may be coming full circle. Global capitalism is facing global crises. A planet with finite resources is testing the limits of capitalism’s ingenuity both to extract yet more wealth and to prey on new markets. Meanwhile, the consequences of the historic and continuing over-extraction of resources are being felt in the form of a planet-wide shock, from toxic overload (pollution) to a rapidly changing climate.

Capitalism and its technicians – the West’s political, business, media, and technocratic elites – are facing their own crisis of legitimacy, as the system they oversee and for which they serve as propagandists begins its gradual collapse. There is only so long capitalism’s demise can be blamed on supply-chain problems and “bounceback” from the pandemic.

Western elites understand all of this only too keenly. They know far more than they, or the corporate media, let on. Knowledge is power, and they are in power. Their task is to stay in power. And that can only happen so long as they remain ahead of us, so long as they manipulate us, so long as they control us, so long they turn us against each other.

Gain of function

Here a Covid analogy may be helpful.

For many years the United States has been investing large sums of money in medical research called “gain of function.” Anthony Fauci, the U.S. president’s chief medical adviser, is one of the main proponents of gain of function. Its supposed aim is to experiment on cold and flu viruses to see how they might evolve into more lethal strains so that cures can be found ahead of time, in the form of vaccines and drug treatments. (One plausible theory of how we ended up with Covid-19 is that one of these Frankenstein viruses leaked from the lab in Wuhan, where the U.S. was funding gain-of-function research to avoid a U.S. embargo. For more on that, see here.)

The ostensible purpose of gain of function is to pre-empt the emergence of a more deadly virus, or at least to devise ways to treat it more efficiently. (Another possible purpose, of course, is to create bio-weapons against an enemy.)

The question is: Have our elites been carrying out similar “gain of function” research on us, treating us as the equivalent of a virus that may over time become more lethal to their narrow interests of maintaining wealth and power for themselves in a system facing imminent collapse? Have they been learning from their experiments in Latin America, the former eastern bloc, and the Middle East to understand how better to control us, to curb our protest and dissent, to prevent revolution?

The answer is simple: they would be incredibly foolish or naïve, and astoundingly relaxed about their own self-preservation as a class, had they failed to do precisely this. We have had brief glimpses via the Snowden revelations of how they have been preparing for the endgame of capitalism. Western intelligence agencies have been systematically spying on their own populations.

Splintered left

In a sense, there is nothing especially sinister or conspiratorial about any of this. As new technologies have given Western elites new tools for surveillance and monitoring of our conversations, our thoughts and moods (welcome to the Metaverse), our movements, our financial dealings, and now our bodily autonomy and health, it was inevitable that elites would turn these tools against us in preparation for the moment when their own privileges were in danger.

My latest: Netflix's The Social Dilemma, featuring Silicon Valley whistleblowers, seeks to explain how Google and Facebook have pushed our societies to the brink of collapse.

The alarm is justified – but the film is able to tell only half the story https://t.co/YZhrcFx3P8

— Jonathan Cook (@Jonathan_K_Cook) September 25, 2020

In fact, the conspiracy paradigm misses the point entirely. Structures of power are organized to maintain power. Those power systems simply have been responding, as they are designed to respond, to opportunities for protecting or accreting power, like a leaf initiates photosynthesis when it is exposed to light. It is an instinctive reaction more than strategy or plot.

The elites’ social – as opposed to medical – gain-of-function research has highlighted to them an age-old lesson: that divide and rule, the cultivation of tribalism, is an insurance policy against successful dissent and the threat of revolution.

My latest: A tribal left is bound to be the mirror image of a tribal right. They have different pieties, different slogans, but the same intolerance, the same self-righteousness, the same anger https://t.co/kArAhK6QRY

— Jonathan Cook (@Jonathan_K_Cook) November 26, 2021

Which is why every time ordinary people take to the street in protest at the accretion of more power by the technocrats, or to oppose more propaganda and mind manipulation from the corporate media, the left fractures and splinters further.

Large sections of the left always find a reason to object to those taking to the streets. The Occupy Movement, the Yellow Vests in France, the Black Lives Matter Protests, the January 6th Rally, the Extinction Rebellion Blockades, the Trucker Protests. None of them are worthy. Their motives are not pure enough. The messages are too vague. The chants are too noisy. The anger is too alienating and the populism too discomfiting. And the participants are from the wrong tribe.

The longer this disdain for protest lasts, the more the protesters’ alienation from the corrupt power-elites evokes fear rather than solidarity, the more the left itself is paralyzed into inaction, then the more certain it is that these protests will be captured by the right, by the Donald Trumps and the Tucker Carlsons. The more we insult the protesters by calling them rightwing, Nazis, anti-worker, dangerous, Trumpists, the more we ensure they become what we accuse them of being.

And in the meantime, by default, we have given our support to the technocrats who are destroying the planet, who are issuing a death sentence to our children – all in the name of civilization, progress and science.

Before we know it, we have become Justin Trudeau.

[Marionumber1]

I've been pretty occupied with other things and wasn't able to be active here on RI for a while, but I did want to respond to this piece shared by Belligerent Savant.

This piece here touches on aspects of this conversation. The perspective of a college-aged teen, self-identified 'liberal', and decisions she made to switch schools, and the adjustment of pre-conceived notions.

https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/last-y ... -mawr-girl

Last Year, I Was a Bryn Mawr Girl. Now I’m at Hillsdale.

Growing up in a conservative town, I always dreamed of attending college with liberals like me. The pandemic changed everything.

[...]

Honestly, I just don't find many of her takeaways about "liberal" universities like Bryn Mawr all that compelling. She was disappointed that she and her friends weren't "arguing about big questions" because it "was assumed that we all agreed on the answers", but what exactly is that supposed to mean? Did she actually disagree with them on anything in particular, or was she just fantasizing about arbitrary debates for debates' sake? If there was some unspoken "truth" held self-evident by her friends that she disagreed with, why didn't she try breaking the ice by questioning it, instead of doing nothing and later complaining in an article about how disappointing the discourse was at Bryn Mawr?

I understand how the fear of being shunned for one's beliefs, especially when they conflict with everyone else's consensus reality, can make one reluctant to say anything at all. But giving into that fear is also what allows an echo chamber to stay an echo chamber. When she says:

Those two semesters at home hadn’t been kind to me. I didn’t really keep in touch with my Bryn Mawr friends; gazing at their mansions through a glitchy Zoom made me feel like an outsider. When we did talk, they obsessed over how scared they were of the virus and how many precautions they were taking, as though it was some kind of competition. Instead of sharing my thoughts and experiences, I stayed silent because I feared their criticism and eventually dropped off.

It seems like she thinks that there's absolutely no way she could have expressed her feelings that wouldn't have led to her being shunned. And I find that hard to believe. She didn't have to go nuclear on her classmates' whole belief systems, nor do I think she had any intention of that. Something along the lines of "I understand how scared you guys are, but honestly, being so disconnected from everyone is hurting my mental health, and I wonder if public health authorities are thinking about the drawbacks of being locked down like this". No matter how "liberal" (I barely even know what that term is supposed to mean anymore) her friends were, it's unlikely that a reasonable point like that made in a respectful way would provoke such a major negative response. It also wouldn't change their minds in an instant, but she'd have a chance to be heard by them and she might put some cracks in their own ideology that they otherwise might not receive.

I can give some perspective on this, because I am a college student, pretty close in age to the author herself. The university I go to isn't some hoity-toity liberal arts school like Bryn Mawr, but it is decidedly "liberal"-biased in its staff and student body. There were plenty of views I had which I felt could be too extreme and risk me getting shunned by my classmates or friends. But rather than just keep them to myself, I worked out ways to frame them in the most tactful manner: not always making the most extreme claims regarding how I believed but at least starting to push in that direction, deliberately emphasizing the common ground with my peers' existing beliefs, and sticking to facts that could be easily established. All throughout my time in college, that's worked incredibly well. The points tend to make an impact, and I have noticed that over time, my "liberal" friends have begun accepting more of my controversial beliefs that they used to reject. That has been true on socioeconomic policy beliefs (I was unashamedly left-wing/socialist, and my closest friends used to groan over me saying so, but have now reached a similar place), the "conspiracy theories" I have on things like 9/11 and mind control, and, yes, all the official lies surrounding COVID which I've been bringing up to them basically ever since March 2020.

As for the author's experience at Hillsdale: I am of course glad for her that she was able to live a normal college experience like everyone in her position deserves. And it's great that the interviewers and professors showed an open-mindedness towards her contrary views on controversial issues like religion. But it seems like she's trying to claim that she wouldn't have been able to have such an experience at Bryn Mawr when, again, it doesn't appear that she even attempted to do so and she doesn't even mention any such disagreements that she had prior to COVID. Moreover, she focuses on how adults working at the school were open to these debates, but says nothing about the student body; note that her experience with her professor was in "office hours", meaning it was likely a one-on-one between them. Good professors at any university will take that kind of open-minded approach, but comparing that experience at Hillsdale to how fearful she seemed of rocking the boat with her classmates at Bryn Mawr is comparing apples to oranges.

Religion is also probably not the best comparison to COVID policy when it comes to controversial issues, because despite the stereotype, most Christians in the US are tolerant of others' beliefs (or lack thereof) no matter how strongly they believe themselves. A better comparison would be something like calling capitalism immoral, defending left-wing governments in the so-called "third world", or claiming that the Founding Fathers were terrible people. Somehow, I suspect that if she began arguing for those points among her Hillsdale classmates, there'd be a risk of them treating her similarly to how she feared her Bryn Mawr classmates would treat her for challenging the COVID orthodoxy.

That is my ultimate point: I don't think "liberals" are less open-minded than "conservatives" overall, they just tend to switch off on which issues they are open-minded on and which ones they aren't. And that is the core of my argument about the mainstream media, that we really have two different mainstream medias to cater to each group's biases. Right now, the "conservatives" seem to be better on the COVID issue than the "liberals". They're also worse on other issues, like social welfare programs, not falling for garbage about "voter fraud" that really aims to suppress voters, the willingness to teach real history in schools, and the willingness to call out pedophiles in their own party (I have seen more people defending Trump's Epstein connections than Clinton's, even though Trump's are arguably more damning). Maybe COVID policy matters more than all of that right now; I'm sure some people genuinely feel that way and I understand where they're coming from. Sometimes, though, it feels like the RI user base considers COVID to practically be the only issue worth discussing, and then we end up with questionable arguments that are giving the "conservatives" far more credit than they deserve.

Both groups have serious biases. I also think the apparent extremism we see in places like social media make it seem like these biases are too ingrained to be overcome, when that isn't actually true. Maybe this is naive optimism, but at least as far as real-world encounters are concerned, I tend to feel that both the "liberals" and "conservatives" are full of largely reasonable people who will listen to your controversial opinions if you're able to express yourself respectfully and tactfully.

[stickdog99]

Do you know that I would be fired from every job I have as well as completely ostracized from every community (other than this and one other online community) that I am part of if anyone I interact with other than my partner knew that this was me and read what I have been posting here?

Do you have any idea what is happening to people in Canada right now just for peacefully protesting government repression? Who do you think is cheering their persecution?

https://www.latimes.com/california/stor ... egislature