Does the actual "Left" even exist anymore? - Or, is it just edgy kids LARPing?
- Thread starter Effluvium
- Start date
antifas are usually idealistic but naive and/or stupid, while tankies are always evil, sociopathic and stupid. I would not waste time on deciphering anything they say, as their actions always boil down to "beat up people who don't agree with us" for antifas and "let the Great Purge start!" for tankies anyways.
At this rate, I could said they're both naive and stupid.
I saw by luck, this opinion about what happened to the "left" in French and translated in English. Some of his points fit right in this thread.
Xerxes IX
New cat, who this?
Reminds me of the so called "leftist" useful idiots during the GME short squeeze who were crying about nooooooo you can't laugh at ultra rich people getting fucked for once, here's why that's BAD. And at the same time the MSM was of course taking Wall Street's side and blaming Trumpism of all things for what was hapoening to the stock market and not the vulture capitalists who shorted a stock so much people noticed.
It’s not a new thing... I’ll try to dig up an article I read a few years back. Basically, it described how frequently socialist rebellions in the 19th and 20th centuries would start in the fringes of society, like border towns, the poor, rural communities, etc, but eventually they’d get coopted by urban centers, previous incarnations of bugmen, and bureaucrats.... To make matters worse. if the rebellion was succesful the new ruling class would fuck over the fringes even more.
Forbes had this to say on the matter:
Short sellers don’t drive down markets in vicious fashion as much as their presence as size sellers is a happy sign of growing buying power in size. Again, buying is an essential part of any short sell.
After which it’s time for everyone to get real. Prices are the way that market economies organize themselves. It’s through prices arrived at freely that retailers know which items to stock and which ones to not, plus it’s through share prices that those with precious capital to allocate know where investment is needed, where it isn’t, where it will be wasted (think mortgages back in 200, and where it will be rewarded. Without honest prices in the marketplace, the economy and stock market would plummet.
Please keep this in mind as pundits make their silly arguments about GameStop’s price action signaling a shift of power away from hedge funds, and back to the little guy. Such a view isn’t true, plus it ignores the heroics of short sellers. They’re in truth price givers, and the economy couldn’t function without them.
The Left I knew from before all this woke garbage would have taken Forbes to pieces for this bullshit. Wall Street hedge funds took beloved American brands that still employ thousands of people, and they looted them to fill their pockets while destroying those people’s jobs. In the middle of a goddamn pandemic. Now, I bet they’d be like, “Only gamer manchildren care about GameStop”, and then proceed to whine that /wsb/ are evil Nazis bullying those poor hedge funds.
Everyone loved being able to browse books in Barnes & Noble. Now, we pay Jeffy B, that bald fucking Lex Luthor, for our books, and we don’t get to sit down and read them beforehand and decide whether or not they belong on our bookshelves. Aside from a little tiny excerpt from the beginning, you basically have to buy them blind.
While America suffered, this rich, bald cunt in a giant robot made billions of dollars off of the purchases of millions of scared and isolated people.
The Left that I remember from back in the day would have had something to say about all this that isn’t intersectional drivel.
They imagine the equation suddenly becomes any different if industries are "nationalized and worker controlled".
Meanwhile, if you actually look at places like East Germany, Poland, etc during their communist era, just because factories were nationalized and state controlled didn't make people really any happier.
There's this anecdote I remember hearing about that I'm going to butcher, on East Germany, where someone was visiting a well off friends family in the early 80s. The family were proud of their East German state and factories, proud of their role in the socialist utopia. They had some trad dinner, and then the mother was like "I have a very special treat for you", and bitch just pulls out some shriveled looking orange and "Look at this proud product of socialism, from Crimean SSR" and the people actually seemed to think this was special.
Ultimately, tankie spergs hate to hear this, but people like having cheap and accessible commodities. Its like when soviet era politicians would come to the US in the late 80s, see a supermarket, and just realize that communism was over.
There are some things socialism does do better. In the USSR, homelessness was practically eradicated- and thats a very serious thing. But, on that note, you also had major problems, major abuses of liberties, lack of competition, increased costs to produce commodities, little to no commodities, etc. In East Germany, even if you were "rich" and in a high position, it could take years for the order for a new car to actually get processed.
You could probably reform state capitalism, its a lot better than "bringing it down", but the things proposed to "reform" it are rarely based in reality. I still volunteer with a co-op, most of them fail and utterly suck (the one I'm with actually does work pretty well). All the mutualist stuff, worker control, "direct democracy in the workplace", its all meme shit that almost always turns into a shitshow.
These activists also deny that people, as much as its unequal, really do enjoy the standard of life we have. Noone wants McDonalds to cost $40 a meal, noone wants having a shriveled orange to be a "special and rare treat". Almost everything these people propose would basically guarantee that.
Theres stuff you maybe could argue, in an age where unions are dead (and there was a fair amount of corruption in them), workers probably do need some form of collective bargaining (ie, if a workplace wants to layoff 20% of their staff, it used to be that they'd have to negotiate with a union and have a valid reason. Now, Activision can report increased earnings at a record high, and then they lay off half the blizzard staff and hire temps from Malaysia to make wc3: refunded). Temp/gig workers (amazon, uber, etc) should have better protections & contracts from their employers. Maybe we could reform things to make it so the proles paid less taxes than they are now.
Ultimately, the tankie/antifa sperging just occurs because these people are politically illiterate, economically illiterate, and just want some meme fantasy that actually has no place in reality. For every "worker progress" you have to be aware that you may have to sacrifice productivity, you may make commodities more expensive, etc. If you can figure out ways to better workers lives without making things expensive, thats what reforming capitalism should be about. To these people though, its not. Thats why their meme ideology is garbage and distracts from actual stuff that could make things suck just a bit less from happening, because actual realistic reform is never on the radar to these people jumping on literally the most sensational and cleaved from actual reality ideas.
Expect they don't?
I never understood the "corporations are in the side of the left!"
When reality when if you actually see what they do there marginalized works or the shit they make, it's pretty obvious that they don't care about them / actively hate them
If this was really the case, ViacomCBS should have banned South Park about now and McDonald's would have given every of there trans workers free days off or something
You only think Corporations are "woke" because Corporations are now understanding that liberals and progressives have money a slightly lounder then the right
And even then, there are overwhelming amount of right leaning companies that are being made everyday to pander to the opposite
Not all of them, obviously. But big ones that dominate the culture- Disney, Apple, Coca-Cola, Google- lean noticeably to the Left.
RabidWombat
The Lone Marsupial of the Apocalypse
But we leftists are supposedly out to destroy capitalism! Why would they side with that?
Effluvium
Pirate sites are your friend.
Subversion.
I'm going to risk committing a No True Scotsman fallacy here when I say this, but here goes.
There are currently two kinds of Leftists: normal Leftists, and corporate/woke Leftists.
Normal Leftists (or classical liberals, if you will) are the kind of Leftists you'd find using the Kiwi Farms. They tend to be progressive (e.g., support gay marriage) while not going to far overboard (e.g., supporting gay, child, and animal marriage.) Many hold a healthy distrust of large corporations, but otherwise support well-regulated capitalism. Normal Leftists usually are well read, thoughtful and intelligent, and even if you disagree with them they are generally people you'd like to hang around with.
Corporate/Woke Leftists are what right-wing pundits call "sheeple." They completely lack critical thinking skills of any sort. They can only vomit up whatever catchphrases someone else came up with, and blindly side with anyone (and any corporation) who vomits up those same catchphrases, no matter how corrupt or vile. They have pie-in-the-sky dreams (e.g., making a socialist paradise that will make everything better), and when those don't come true they blame the enemy du jour (white cishet Christian Anglo-American males in this case.)
Normal Leftists were some of history's greatest thinkers, philosophers, and statesmen. Corporate/Woke Leftists are useful idiots who exist simply to help an oligarchy obtain and maintain power.
Carlos Weston Chantor
Experienced For Her Pleasure
Stalin was the last cool leftist and the jews killed him
But... but.... muh horseshoe theory!
WolfeTone
Ball Ween Hammer
Doesn't really matter if things are looping back in on themselves if they're planted firmly on the bad side of the train tracks.
Pentex
You're Ridin' With Biden...STRAIGHT TO HELL!
Left-Right is a stupid and useless political dichotomy that should have died with the rest of the Ancien Regime, but nevertheless, here we are.
What 'The Left' is in modern parlance, are people who can trace their political 'thinking' back to Rousseau, a failed elite and a living, breathing plague on the human race.
The original delusion of 'the Left' that it has inherited from Rousseau is the contrarian, single-minded devotion to upending the former Christian order of Europe.
The foremost upending being a revolt against 'original sin' by the declaration "'L'homme est né libre, et partout il est dans les fers" then proceeds to sing half-baked paeans to the innocent and noble savage, and how society, rather than individual failing or supernatural corruption, is responsible for our vices and shortcomings.
One can easily hear the echoes of Rousseau's bleatings in the whining of the current 'Left' that 'capitalism/white supremacy/patriarchy/heteronormativity makes me do what I don't want, but if society were destroyed everything would be wonderful.' How would it be wonderful? Don't know. Who would make it wonderful? Don't know. How long would it take between destruction and wonderfulness? Don't know.
Curiously, all of the moralist-materialist philosophes who call for the destruction of the world that so cruelly demands that they behave like rational, responsible adults (Rousseau, Marx, Fanon) are rather silent on the building of the new world.
Ironically, materialism is the contemporary Left's own 'original sin' inherited from Rousseau, that men are just lumps of clay to be molded by economic forces and institutions into whatever shape the directors of those forces and institutions desire, unless one receives the 'moralistic' revelation of socialism, which 'allows' the adherent to see and become fixated on the 'systems of his oppression.' This is why 'the Left' is obsessed with subverting, controlling, or destroying every institution in society.
What 'The Left' is in modern parlance, are people who can trace their political 'thinking' back to Rousseau, a failed elite and a living, breathing plague on the human race.
The original delusion of 'the Left' that it has inherited from Rousseau is the contrarian, single-minded devotion to upending the former Christian order of Europe.
The foremost upending being a revolt against 'original sin' by the declaration "'L'homme est né libre, et partout il est dans les fers" then proceeds to sing half-baked paeans to the innocent and noble savage, and how society, rather than individual failing or supernatural corruption, is responsible for our vices and shortcomings.
One can easily hear the echoes of Rousseau's bleatings in the whining of the current 'Left' that 'capitalism/white supremacy/patriarchy/heteronormativity makes me do what I don't want, but if society were destroyed everything would be wonderful.' How would it be wonderful? Don't know. Who would make it wonderful? Don't know. How long would it take between destruction and wonderfulness? Don't know.
Curiously, all of the moralist-materialist philosophes who call for the destruction of the world that so cruelly demands that they behave like rational, responsible adults (Rousseau, Marx, Fanon) are rather silent on the building of the new world.
Ironically, materialism is the contemporary Left's own 'original sin' inherited from Rousseau, that men are just lumps of clay to be molded by economic forces and institutions into whatever shape the directors of those forces and institutions desire, unless one receives the 'moralistic' revelation of socialism, which 'allows' the adherent to see and become fixated on the 'systems of his oppression.' This is why 'the Left' is obsessed with subverting, controlling, or destroying every institution in society.
Last edited:
Zippocat's Revenge
NEDM
Tankies spewing any kind of reformist stuff is a contradiction in terms.
They're fucking retards. They don't even know what their OWN political ideology entails.
Unyielding Stupidity
Zero thoughts - Head empty
The old-school left sold out their old supporter base of the working class, purely because it's simply easier to import masses of third-world citizens and then label your party as their only choice due to anything even remotely right-wing being labelled and vilified as "racist". Notice how in pretty much every "diverse" neighbourhood in the West, they always vote massively in favour of the main left-wing party of their respective country. Why deal with a bunch of union-supporting miners, farmers or factory workers that may not vote for you if you fail to provide tangible results to improve their economic position, when you can just import Ahmed and his extended family of 250 people who will vote for you no matter what?
It also helps that this mass importation also helps the corporations that make up the majority of funding for the right-wing, by providing them with an abundance of labour which means they don't have to offer competitive wages or better working conditions.
It also helps that this mass importation also helps the corporations that make up the majority of funding for the right-wing, by providing them with an abundance of labour which means they don't have to offer competitive wages or better working conditions.
teriyakiburns
Few people in comedy have careers after age 50.
The rare ones that do are even worse, because they're insufferably smug on top of everything else and use their knowledge of marxist scripture as a club to browbeat their own side into obedience.
