Posts you had second thought about and decided not to post - put them here

xp yeah

unrelated

I don’t know how to process the fact that there are actually people who think things are generally going well and we’re more or less on the right track. must be nice

Some things have gotten better, others have gotten worse.

Left, I'm in the same boat.

it’s weird, these opinions/feelings are actually very common but somehow they feel incredibly marginal at the same time

the less panglossian ones i mean

anybody who has these feelings but expresses them with insufficient rigor is immediately lambasted for being a panglossian liberal schmuck, might be part of the problem

The post-occupy emphasis on the 1% (or the .1% or billionaires or some other classification) has obscured the divide between the upper-middle class and everyone else. For people in the top third socio-economically, the last couple of decades have been going quite well.

ie Biden's promise to not tax the poor downtrodden souls earning only a quarter mil a year.

Promising not to tax themselves.

lads

In my household, we vote and campaign for democratic socialists and progressives, we donate to their campaigns all over the country, including Democratic primaries, because we share their views on the vast majority of the issues. IRL, I'm one of the most left-leaning and politically involved people I know. Because I find myself constantly at odds with the "actual" leftists on ILX, I learned my politics have no place here. You can add that to the ways in which I'm a panglossian liberal in the Phil Ochs sense.

Sure there is if they won't shut up about it for two seconds.

I think maybe uspol’s endless cycle of left-punching could be just normal boring if the posters in question ever dropped the wide-eyed “actions? who judges by actions? sounds like PURITY to me” nonsense. Instead it’s just the unlovely combo of spiteful and boring that it seems to be every time I look in there.

I'd argue that both camps have tiresome shticks that get replayed day in and out.

Normal boring. :)

Yes, but it's normal boring that goes both ways.

(second thoughts thread, so not expecting or pushing for engagement, just observing:)

Tom, multiple people have posted that they would appreciate you expressing your politics here, both for its own sake, and as an alternative to your attacking or insulting other posters as a substitute for discussion. If other people have posted that you should never express your politics, those people said something dumb.

On the other hand, you have argued that no citizen of any given non-US country should ever post about US politics, even if the US military operates a couple of dozen bases and spy facilities in that country, mostly free from local personnel or oversight of any kind (a detail especially poignant in 2020, when those facilities are exempt from the pandemic restrictions that have kept citizens out of the country for nine months and counting while the Prime Minister insults them).

I don’t recall belonging to the “fuck off foreigners” club but you’re sic so I know you have an old post handy that proves I said it at some point.

Thanks for following up.

to be clear, it doesn't count if we said it to Fred

Everyone said it to Fred, regardless of nationality.

Tbf we should all post more about Danish politics.

lets not encourage him back here please

once you have heeded the Dane melt, you never get rid of the Dane.

Undead Mink '23

the thing about fred was that he was a foreigner in a deeper sense, to the rest of humanity

a fred to all is a fred to none. but a fred fp'd is a fred indeed.

i wonder if fred has ever made love to famous american political satirist randy newman

spruce springclean (darraghmac)
Posted: 30 November 2020 at 22:30:10
Oh god

Otm

Yeah my Mom is genuinely spooked

can confirm

"your mom" jokes are terrible for everyone involved, but like a moth to the flame .....

more like YOUR MOM to the flame

While I can agree with the core of what you're saying, the uncompromising tone of these hardline rhetorical positions is really just like 'please, everyone to the left of the GOP, let us balkanize to the point where we are no longer capable of any kind of functional coalition'.

judging politicians on their record in office is grossly unfair, it's true

Not even remotely related to what I was saying but okay

oh great now it's a thing in this thread too

i wasn't specifically responding to you OL but let's be real, no beastliness to the centrist tendency is acceptable, one of these days they might just surprise ya

narrator's voice:

me mind on fire

While I can agree with the core of what you're saying, the uncompromising tone of these hardline rhetorical positions is really just like 'please, everyone to the left of the GOP, let us balkanize to the point where we are no longer capable of any kind of functional coalition'.

If it were possible to harness the rotatory energy from circular internet arguments, we could light the world.

we can melt the ice-caps be we can't melt the melts!

We gotta melt the melts
We gotta face the face

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NS3nRcwWktA

'You could try saying that thing that I agree with in a less sneeringly self-righteous way such that we might convince others who aren't already firmly in your camp to agree with the valid point you're trying to make.'

'OH I SEE YOU MUST HATE THE YOUNGS YOU DODDERING OLD CENTRIST'

Defund The Tone Police

I close my eyes
Only for a moment
Now my post is gone

xps to OL this might be a point worth making (and hearing) if the people I am talking about ever gave the slightest indication that they understood the context of the people they so readily deem impatient and childish. But no, it’s just amisooutoftouch.gif all over and over and over again.

The argument you keep returning to, and I don’t know if you realise you are making it, is that the tone of the argument is wrong, so essentially saying people should be nicer to you in order to get you on board. This comes across regardless of the context being such that if you are a younger person (and btw this is something I get from people in their twenties), they have a huge amount of contempt towards progressives in their 30s and 40s who haven’t got their shit together to sort out climate change and now the continued existence of the species itself is at risk. So, no, manners are not the thing to clutch your pearls over here.

ftr I am differentiating here between something like '(hearable and sensible leftist position)' and 'if you don't agree with (hearable and sensible leftist position) completely you're less than human'.

Also this is 0% to do with getting me on board (I am) or being nicer to me (IDGAF). It has 100% to do with growing a message, persuading those who aren't already on board, building a coalition, etc. If it's more important to preach to the choir than to actually effect change, then IDGI.

so we have this c onvo going on in two diff threads now, cool