'Liberals'/'Leftists' in America

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Re: 'Liberals'/'Leftists' in America

Postby JackRiddler » Thu Jan 27, 2022 12:06 pm

I give up.

I was just coming here in the hope I'd be in time to add that my real point was, less is more, especially if it's less NOISE. Why bother focusing on morbid symptoms and the variably interpretable platitudes of individual idiots and icons marketed by media corporations as ostensible branded spokespersons for some supposed idea that you're supposed to share? Why be distracted by froth rather than actual program, policy, law, action? Instead, within minutes in response to my initial attempt, I find an exegesis and parsing of the transcript of the 30-second MSNBC promotional spot as thorough as anything devoted here to the text of the Bible, Marx, or Phil Dick. As if this particular word salad is really important in some larger scheme, or indicative of The Program. This is how hardened positions and reflexes get.

Meanwhile, you want to see the idea that children are property of the state? Sure, the masking, school exclusion, and forced C19 vaccination of young children whose risks are obviously higher from it than from anything imputed to Covid is obvious, and well covered here, obsessively well. But meanwhile, most of the states in the union are advancing censorship, book-banning and gag orders to apply to public schools and universities. In the name of parents, of course!

https://pen.org/steep-rise-gag-orders-m ... y-drafted/

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Re: 'Liberals'/'Leftists' in America

Postby Harvey » Thu Jan 27, 2022 12:18 pm

Persevere. As I said, I agree with you.

From your link:

To appreciate the nature of this new crop of bills, it is helpful to focus on legislation from a single state: Indiana. With eight bills currently under consideration, only Missouri (at 19) has made a greater contribution. Of the eight in Indiana, all target public K-12 schools, two target private K-12 as well, six would regulate speech in public colleges and universities, four affect various state agencies, and two threaten public libraries. All are sweeping, all are draconian, and few make any kind of sense.

HB 1362 is a good example. Co-sponsored by Representative Bob Behning, who chairs the House Education Committee, the bill would prohibit public school teachers and college faculty from including or promoting in their instruction certain ideas about “sex, race, ethnicity, religion, color, national origin, or political affiliation.” The inclusion of “political affiliation”, which we wrote about last month in relation to a South Carolina bill, is meant to discourage educators from favoring one political group or ideology over another. But in virtually the same breath, the bill also prohibits teachers and professors from including in their instruction any “anti-American ideologies.” What this means is never explained, but violators may be sued in court.

HB 1040 is even more confusing. After rattling off a similar list of prohibited ideas, it mandates that teachers adopt a posture of impartiality in any conversation about controversial historical events. But it then goes on to state that in the run-up to a general election, students must be taught that:

[S]ocialism, Marxism, communism, totalitarianism, or similar political systems are incompatible with and in conflict with the principles of freedom upon which the United States was founded. In addition, students must be instructed that if any of these political systems were to replace the current form of government, the government of the United States would be overthrown and existing freedoms under the Constitution of the United States would no longer exist. As such, socialism, Marxism, communism, totalitarianism, or similar political systems are detrimental to the people of the United States.


Such a mandate for a public school teacher is alarming enough in its own right. But requiring that teachers deliver these lessons while also maintaining a posture of impartiality is positively farcical. Or at least it would be, if the consequences of failure – in this case, civil suits, loss of state funding and accreditation, and professional discipline up to and including termination – were not so dire.
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Re: 'Liberals'/'Leftists' in America

Postby Belligerent Savant » Tue Feb 01, 2022 11:09 pm

A Plea To My Left-Leaning Friends

Posted on January 30, 2022 by Mark

I’m a lefty. I always have been, and probably always will be. While I can see the virtue in “individual responsibility” and self-reliance espoused by the political right, I believe firmly that we need to look out for each other, and that a world in which everyone has their basic needs met and no one gets to extract wealth from others simply because they are wealthy is a world that we should work toward, even as we face declining resources and inevitable shortages in the years ahead.

I believe all profit from rent is a form of usury. I believe that profit from health care is immoral. I believe that housing and health care are human rights. I believe that refugees and immigrants are human beings and deserve to be treated as such, with empathy and respect, even if we must sometimes enact limits and restrictions. I believe that all labor deserves a living wage. I believe in a woman’s right to choose. I believe that neoliberal capitalism is basically evil. I believe in revitalizing local communities and local economies and taking business away from multinational billionaire-led corporations.

You also believe most or all of these things. We used to talk about them, share visions and ideas. Then you walked away down a path that I could not follow, leaving me feeling abandoned, dumbfounded, and befuddled. Now you seem to lump me in with the right, with whatever thoughts and motivations you project upon them: selfishness, individualism, lack of compassion and empathy, bigotry, racism.

If the CEO of Monsanto, with the backing of the FDA, were to tell you that the solution to world hunger and climate change is GMO-chemical agriculture, would you believe him? It is certainly an argument that has been tried. If Elon Musk were to tell you that the solution to climate change is a total conversion to electric vehicles, would you believe him? If, ten years from now, we are all driving Teslas and Musk is a trillionaire but we’re still emitting the same amount of carbon generating the electricity and mining the lithium, would you still believe him?

Something very odd happened two years ago when a strange new virus appeared on the scene. You chose to believe that it was different this time: that the ecocidal, elitist capitalist villains in Big Medicine, in Big Pharma, in government regulatory institutions had the answers, if only we would deign to listen. That they knew how to control this pandemic. That they would rise to the occasion to become the true heroes that they never were before.

You chose to believe The Science. The same Science that calls fracked natural gas “clean energy.” The same Science that believes in chemical-intensive GMO agriculture. The same Science that brought us an epidemic of unnecessary opioid addiction.

With strong urging from the media, you went along with denunciation and discrediting of highly credentialed voices – allowing them to be somehow associated with the all-consuming taint of Donald Trump and his followers. Dr. Pierre Kory, a highly-respected critical care doctor, founded the Front Line Covid-19 Critical Care Alliance, seeking to find repurposed drugs that would be effective against this new virus. When they discovered that ivermectin – a widely used and extremely safe antiparasitic drug that earned its discoverer a Nobel Prize – seemed to work, authorities responded by banning doctors from using it and describing it as “horse dewormer.” Does it actually work? It certainly appears to at least in some cases, but even if it didn’t what is the harm in letting doctors use their training and experience to find solutions to a novel problem?

When authorities decided to recommend and then require masks – in spite of a whole body of past research finding little to no efficacy against flu transmission – you not only obeyed without question but proceeded to brand anyone who so much as questioned it an “anti-masker”, someone who clearly cared only about themselves and wanted other people to die.

When epidemiologists from Stanford, Harvard, and Oxford came together to issue a statement saying lockdowns and restrictions were doing more harm than good, and that we could save more lives by focusing on protection of the most vulnerable, and they were quickly slandered and debunked in the media, you didn’t ask whether there might be more to this story.

When vaccines were released in record time under emergency use authorizations, having been tested for a mere six months, you believed the assertions that they were “safe and effective”. When highly regarded vaccinologists like Dr. Robert Malone and Dr. Geert Vanden Bossche voiced serious concerns, you accepted “fact-checking” claims that they were peddling “disinformation” for their own supposed gain. When the only system we have for recording vaccine adverse events – VAERS – registered more disability and death following these shots than following all other vaccines combined over the past 30 years – you accepted the explanation that these reports are unverified and therefore probably meaningless. When 12-year-old Maddie de Garay, a volunteer in the Pfizer vaccine trial, spoke out about becoming wheelchair bound and unable to participate in daily life after getting the shots (while the trial only recorded her symptoms as “stomach discomfort”), you noticed that only right-leaning outlets would interview her and so you assumed the motivation must be political. When the vaccine-injured began telling their stories – how their health crashed after the shots and their doctors didn’t take them seriously or failed to consider a connection to the vaccine – you ignored that too and supported censorship of their voices.

I had hope for the vaccines as well, at first. I almost got them back in May, but I had made a promise to myself to wait a year, which I am now glad I kept.

We were promised that vaccinated people would be “dead ends” for the virus. Then the Delta wave came along, with some of the highest case rates in the most-vaccinated countries, and high rates of breakthrough infection. I thought this might lead to you doubting the vaccines, or at least doubting the wisdom of mandating them, but instead you doubled down, asserting that they protected against hospitalization and death, and that was enough.

When immunity proved to wane after 5-6 months, you signed up for booster shots, despite the fact that we had no meaningful clinical trials whatsoever to justify them. When Omicron came around – exceedingly contagious but causing much milder illness and infecting vaccinated and unvaccinated people equally – you accepted the logic that this meant we needed more boosters, maybe even to require boosters for everyone. You believed baseless assertions that “the unvaccinated” people were to blame for continuing infection, even as the virus spread through 100% vaccinated college campuses and even as the most-vaccinated countries tallied the highest case rates in the world, suggesting that vaccine efficacy might even be negative. You supported incredibly divisive vaccine mandates that were virtually guaranteed to exacerbate ongoing labor shortages in health care, transportation, food processing, and other sectors that were already under severe stress.

Perhaps I sound a bit angry. This has been a difficult two years. But I’m not really angry at you. I would like to be friends again, to talk about the world we would like to create: resilient communities outside of the global capitalist system, mutual aid networks, local food webs. I would like to gather and sing and dance together again, free from the idea that we are all walking bags of death (with the unvaccinated the deadliest of all).

But it seems like you are still under some sort of spell, and I have to wonder: what would it take to break it? How low does the covid death rate have to go before you can treat it as an acceptable risk like the flu? How many vaccine injuries have to happen before you can acknowledge that these shots have real risks and may not be advisable for everyone of all age groups? How many boosters will you accept in the face of diminishing returns, as the virus continues to evolve?

Does Dr. Fauci need to recant, or the CDC, or CNN, or NPR? I’m not sure that’s ever going to happen. People with power and influence tend not to admit they were wrong. They will try to walk away quietly, to move on to the next crisis or news story without any reflection or self-examination.

I’m not sure I can do anything to break this spell, but whenever you are ready to leave it behind I’ll be here waiting. And perhaps then we can start to see this whole episode as not so different from previous failures of technology and capitalism. Overconfidence in the face of uncertainty. Advertised solutions that are conveniently profitable for the wealthiest citizens. Destruction and demonization of the working class. Disastrous effects on human health and community solidarity shoved under the rug. Blame cast upon our fellow citizens (“the unvaccinated” are the new “deplorables”) rather than on those at the top, when their “solutions” fail to work as promised.

Let us please not let this go on much longer.

It’s OK to occasionally agree about something with the folks waving the confederate flags. Just because one side of a debate has people you personally despise, or people who have stupid political reasons for acting as they do, does not mean that side is wrong. As I write this, the media is playing that game to discredit the Canadian trucker protest against vaccine mandates. It’s time to stop falling for it, to accept that none of our efforts – lockdowns, masks, vaccines – can stop this virus from becoming endemic, and to come back together to create a new way of being and living as the extractive global capitalist system crumbles around us.


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Re: 'Liberals'/'Leftists' in America

Postby Belligerent Savant » Wed Feb 02, 2022 12:09 am

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Re: 'Liberals'/'Leftists' in America

Postby conniption » Wed Feb 02, 2022 5:07 am

winteroak org
(embedded links)

Who’s behind the fake-left vaccine gang?

by Paul Cudenec
October 20, 2021


Image

A group of mask-wearing protesters in Brisbane, Australia, are gathered behind a banner bearing the words “Pro Vaccine, Pro Health, Anti Fascist” – a nonsensically self-contradictory combination of labels if ever there was one.

Using an aggressive tone traditionally reserved for arms dealers, corporate politicians and actual fascists, a woman expresses her hatred for Australians who have taken to the streets to oppose the Great Reset tyranny and demand the return of their freedom.

She angrily denounces as “conspiracy theories” and “lies” any suggestion that Big Pharma’s jabs might not be safe.

These are “dangerous ideas” she says, which “demonstrate a wilful disregard for the health and safety of the majority”.

“Shame! Shame!” bleat her comrades in unison. “You freaks make us sick” declares one of their placards. “Don’t be a scab, get the jab” says another.

Image

Questioning the official Covid-1984 agenda is apparently, for this conformist cult, a heresy of the worst kind.

Their stance is yet another reminder that there is something about the 2020s “left” that really stinks.

What is supposedly an “opposition” movement against corporate control of our lives has progressively abandoned all positions which actually challenge the status quo.

Instead, its memes, talking points and pet causes serve merely to reinforce the narratives of power.

There are a number of articles on my blog and on the Winter Oak site which analyse what has happened to the left, including the anarchist wing of which I have long been part.

I had recently been feeling that I had perhaps now said enough on the subject and that it was time to move on to other things, but the video of the Brisbane group (whoever they are) prompted me to take another dip into this phoney-radical world of manipulation.

Ever since March 2020, leftists have been busy denouncing those who question the official pandemic narrative and sometimes physically opposing anti-lockdown protests, notably in Germany.

But I am now wondering if we are seeing the start of a more dangerous instrumentalisation of these political pawns, who will be used to reinforce, with physical threats and violence, the official “fascist” smears used systematically and indiscriminately against genuine dissidents.

Anti-fascists using “fascist-like” tactics when confronting fascism is one thing, but using the same approach against those of us who are opposing the very real fascism of the system would be a giant goosestep into a parallel upside-down universe!

Who are exactly are these people?

The overall picture that has emerged from my research is of a vast interlocking network of “progressive” organisations closely linked both to the world of international finance (particularly impact investors) and to state-linked “think tanks”.

A typical node in this fake-left global web is the Dutch-based Transnational Institute (TNI).

It boasts on its website that its history “has been entwined with the history of global social movements and their struggle for economic, social and environmental justice”.

And yet on the same page it admits that its origins lie in the US military complex: “It all began at a high-powered State Department meeting full of generals and defence industry executives in 1961, at the height of the Cold War”.

Its latest financial report shows that its funders include the EU, the Dutch government, the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit and various “philanthropic funds” such as the Rockefeller Foundation and the Open Society Foundation.

It also receives money from the impact-orientated Fondation Charles Léopold Mayer in France and TNI board member Imad Sabi is a founding member of the Board of Engaged Donors for Global Equity (EDGE), whose key role in the interface between impact investors and the “left” I exposed in this February 2021 article.

Image

TNI is in fact the European offshoot of the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, DC, a high-profile “think tank” initially funded by the Sears heir, Philip M. Stern, and banker, James Warburg. Most of the money came from the late Samuel Rubin, a rich businessman who founded cosmetics firm Fabergé, Inc.

Indeed, it appears that the Samuel Rubin Foundation has been “an important funder of the Transnational Institute for many years”. TNI set up the Samuel Rubin Young Fellowship Programme in honor of Rubin’s support.

TNI narratives are (of course!) endorsed by Naomi Klein, the fake-left fake-green poster girl of the global financial mafia.

In trying to understand where “pro-vaccine” activism fits in with all this, I found that is being embraced by numerous “left” groups.

Take, for instance, Global Justice Now, which describes itself as a “democratic social justice organisation working as part of a global movement to challenge the powerful and create a more just and equal world”.

A recent tweet showed photos of a protest the group had held regarding Covid jabs.

Their claim was that “the UK is complicit in Covid deaths” because not enough human beings are being jabbed. “Vaccinate the world”, their banner demanded.

Image

Of course, being a supposedly left-wing group, they have to wrap this position up in terms of global injustice (it’s not fair that people in the Global South are not getting same same drugs as us!) and even of criticism of Big Pharma (whose patents are said to be pricing some countries out of the market).

But essentially this is exactly the same demand as that being made by Klaus Schwab’s World Economic Forum, which condemns “vaccine nationalism” and supports the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in its desire to “accelerate the development and manufacture of COVID-19 vaccines, and to guarantee fair and equitable access for every participating country”.

The WEF’s profit-orientated angle, stripped of the “progressive” tinsel, is that “making sure everyone has equal access to COVID-19 vaccines could be worth more than $460 billion to 10 major economies by 2025”.

The Left In the European Parliament, with its vision of “a socially equitable and sustainable Europe based on international solidarity”, also strongly supports so-called “Vaccine Equality”.

Amnesty International is less concerned with the abolition of freedom in the post-Covid world than with promoting the same #vaccineequality meme, declaring: “None of us are safe until we’re all safe”.

Meanwhile, in France, the “left-wing” Attac network is engaged in a struggle against what it calls “Vaccine Apartheid”, by which it does not mean the exclusion of millions of unvaccinated people from society via the pass sanitaire.

In an article illustrated with a grim image of Mother Earth being injected with an unknown substance (against her will, one might imagine), it tries to pretend it is bravely taking on “Big Pharma” by calling for unhindered worldwide jabbing.

Image

The Tax Justice Network, an international group calling for “equitable, inclusive and sustainable development”, has been promoting “Civil Society Organisations Calling for Vaccine Access and Equity For ALL”.

A similiar mesage comes from Human Rights Watch (“Protecting Rights, Saving Lies”), which is keen to reassure us regarding safety concerns around universally available jabs “because stringent regulatory authorities and the World Health Organization (WHO) would continue to play their existing role as arbiters of quality and safety for vaccines”.

I have mentioned this organisation before, in my April 2021 article Divide, Rule and Profit: The Intersectional Impact Racket.

Here I revealed that its “partners”, as listed on its website, include investment company Eurazeo plus the Fred Foundation, Oak Foundation and Ford Foundation, all three of which are heavily involved in impact investment.

It seems highly unlikely to me that so many “left-wing” groups could have simultaneously and independently arrived at the same strange position regarding Covid jabs – not to highlight the dangers or the threat of compulsion but instead to call, stridently, for the whole world to be injected in the interests of equality!

So where has this position come from? And why has it been adopted by all these organisations?

One clue may come from the fact that every single one of the “vaccine equality” groups named above has its own page on the Transnational Institute website – Global Justice Now, The Left in the European Parliament, Amnesty International, Attac, Tax Justice Network and Human Rights Watch.

Could that really just be a coincidence?


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https://winteroak.org.uk/2021/10/20/who ... cine-gang/
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Re: 'Liberals'/'Leftists' in America

Postby Joe Hillshoist » Thu Feb 03, 2022 1:15 am

But essentially this is exactly the same demand as that being made by Klaus Schwab’s World Economic Forum, which condemns “vaccine nationalism” and supports the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in its desire to “accelerate the development and manufacture of COVID-19 vaccines, and to guarantee fair and equitable access for every participating country”.


This is wrong. GAVI, the Gates backed vaccine alliance has spent most of the last two years opposing a TRIPs waiver that would enable countries like India or South Africa or other developing nations to produce covid vaccines free of the IP rights (ie patents) associated with them.

It only supports vaccines to the third world on the condition somebody pays full price for them.
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Re: 'Liberals'/'Leftists' in America

Postby stickdog99 » Thu Feb 03, 2022 6:48 am

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Re: 'Liberals'/'Leftists' in America

Postby Belligerent Savant » Mon Feb 07, 2022 10:44 pm

.

The so-called "Left" these days -- the posers -- are increasingly unhinged, nonsensical, and without logic or reason, blindly adhering to Corporate Woke-ism and related conditioning mechanisms. The "Right" isn't immune to media conditioning, of course. But the media pervasively promotes the former and generally browbeats the latter. This, in turn, influences this 'poser left' demo.


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·
Joe Rogan is not a right-winger, he:

- Has never voted GOP
- Endorsed Bernie Sanders
- Supports Medicare For All
- Opposes endless wars
- Supports pardoning Assange/Snowden
- Challenged Ben Shapiro on systemic racism

He’s to the left of the most progressive members of Congress.

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Re: 'Liberals'/'Leftists' in America

Postby Marionumber1 » Mon Feb 07, 2022 11:02 pm

Belligerent Savant » Mon Feb 07, 2022 9:44 pm wrote:the media pervasively promotes the former and generally browbeats the latter


There is a whole different set of mainstream media for the "right" which acts in an equal and opposite manner. It is generally better on certain things that the "liberal" media gets wrong (especially a lot of the COVID narratives now), but also worse on other important issues like social program policies and the shit-tier "voter fraud" allegations which never seem to go away. Different manipulations for different folks, ensuring that both the "left" and "right" have equal measure of blind spots and true perceptions about the world. And the manipulations are calibrated towards the different groups in a way that almost always prevents a critical mass forming behind any policy that would benefit the overall public.

Your overall point about the pitiful state of today's "left" and the example of that with Joe Rogan is, of course, spot on. Just wanted to make the above quite clear to show that the "right" is a mirror to these issues, not merely a side note.
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Re: 'Liberals'/'Leftists' in America

Postby Belligerent Savant » Mon Feb 07, 2022 11:10 pm

.

Yes, this is why I included, "The 'Right' isn't immune to media conditioning, of course", as part of my commentary.

But are you suggesting that it's on equal footing right now?

Of course, so much depends on the media that one chooses to absorb (or perhaps, to a degree, predominantly exposed to depending on leanings within a community/region/household), and with the advent of social media (and sentiment analysis, etc) comes curated politics and echo chambers.

But broadly, mainstream media is more "corporate woke" than "conservative right".

Look at the Olympics. Look at most U.S. Sports (the NFL -- albeit with continued pro-military flare -- and the NBA). Look at most current public school curriculums. Look at most TV Network channels and related programming. Are these institutions more "Left" or more "Right"? At least as far as the distorted mainstream definitions of these terms. This also extends to other polarizing topics of note over the last ~few years: BLM, the Trans movements, "cis/they", etc.

Do you believe the media in the U.S. in today's climate is more Right-leaning, or Left-leaning (once more: I use the words "left" and "right" here as currently defined in mainstream culture)?
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Re: 'Liberals'/'Leftists' in America

Postby Belligerent Savant » Mon Feb 07, 2022 11:37 pm

.

Put it this way: If a casual neutral observer/listener happens across mainstream media, is it more likely to be 'left'-leaning or 'right'-leaning?

We may as well also include Covid in this conversation, right? Covid must touch every thread, apparently.

Do 'pro-maskers' generally identify as being on the 'left' or on the 'right'? Same for anything generally related to covid policy. The 'official' position by the CDC and U.S. govt is decidedly -- since it inevitably became a political topic -- a "left"-leaning position.

In today's climate, it's the "left' broadly against [non-pregnancy related] bodily autonomy. It's the "left" broadly against expression of thought and for censorship. It's the "left" that seems ok with stripping civil liberties. Or removing due process outright from important policy decisions. The "left" appears to be perfectly ok with leaders pushing policy by decree. They largely seem to be perfectly ok with individuals losing their employment, their ability to travel or engage in commerce freely, all because an individual may opt to refuse a medical intervention. They seem perfectly ok with forcing children -- the least at risk -- to wear masks, or to influence their parents to have them inoculated with a still-experimental product. They seem to be perfectly ok, generally, with mandates and other forms of coercion and bullying in order to increase compliance.

All of the above represents current dogma in the U.S. and elsewhere. It's the dominant position and narrative. And it's been largely adopted by the "Left".

Of course, collective sentiment is cyclical, and subject to change. Current collective sentiment is certainly waning and not sustainable. Starting with the midterms later this year, a shift in sentiment appears likely.
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Re: 'Liberals'/'Leftists' in America

Postby Marionumber1 » Mon Feb 07, 2022 11:48 pm

My entire point is that the "mainstream media" is not one universal grouping. News sources like the Washington Post, New York Times, The Atlantic, etc. which are generally lumped in as the "liberal" media are primarily only playing to an audience which has already bought in. The entire right-wing media landscape, which implausibly positions itself as an alternative to the mainstream, is plenty "mainstream" to the large numbers of individuals on the "right" who do take them seriously.

Are key aspects of our culture, like public schools, sports, and entertainment, more "liberal" than "conservative"? To some extent, but a large part of what people call "liberal" or "woke" is just basic shit like teaching uncomfortable yet accurate facts about United States history, acknowledging that gay people do in fact exist, or no longer acting outraged that someone didn't stand to honor the special freedom song about our magic sky cloth. To that extent that "liberal" thought is more prominent, it is in large part because it long managed to avoid being so overtly regressive in comparison to what the other side was putting out. In the era of Russiagate and COVID, of course, that balance seems to be shifting.

I do consider the problematic nature of these two groups on at least commensurate footing. The "right" is full of people who want to ban public schools from teaching historical facts that reveal the US was never the virtuous nation they like to imagine it was (or at least present it as being). And yes, I know that much of the educational discourse on racial issues is polluted by garbage from the corporate "left" (see the 1619 Project, for example). I am also confident that virtually all of the "Critical Race Theory" outrage is based on knee-jerk cognitive dissonance with the ahistorical beliefs that CRT opponents wish to cling to, rather than any kind of nuanced analysis of what is being taught. One group wants to suppress a neutral and highly informative platform airing some uncomfortable truths, the other group wants to block future generations of children from a crucial part of our nation's history that contains some uncomfortable truths... :shrug:
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Re: 'Liberals'/'Leftists' in America

Postby Joe Hillshoist » Tue Feb 08, 2022 12:03 am

Belligerent Savant » 08 Feb 2022 13:10 wrote:.



Do you believe the media in the U.S. in today's climate is more Right-leaning, or Left-leaning (once more: I use the words "left" and "right" here as currently defined in mainstream culture)?


Why would you do that?

Nothing about the media is left wing and by using mainstream definitions you are playing into their bullshit matrix of control.

You've legitimised it.

You might call those people Liberal or Progressive, not left, they aren't synonymous. Far from it.

CNN is right wing.

NYT is right wing.

Mainstream media is right wing. End of story.
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Re: 'Liberals'/'Leftists' in America

Postby Belligerent Savant » Tue Feb 08, 2022 12:04 am

Mario: a large part of what people call "liberal" or "woke" is just basic shit like teaching uncomfortable yet accurate facts about United States history, acknowledging that gay people do in fact exist, or no longer acting outraged that someone didn't stand to honor the special freedom song about our magic sky cloth.


Sorry, but that's no longer the full picture. It's markedly more than that now. Yours is the ostensible definition of woke/liberal. It's become more distorted over the last few years. Also: broadly speaking, these days I find the average person (in my travels across the country: I've been North, South, East and West on business trips, etc) that may identify as being 'on the right' as more tolerant of another human -- regardless of race, color, creed, sexual preference, etc. -- than the average person on the 'Left'. Less tolerant 'leftists', on average, are among those more consumed by social media/standard media tropes on what it means to be "left" or "right", "conservative" vs" liberal".

In other words, the less consumed one is by today's mainstream media (and this includes social media) the more tolerant they tend to be, regardless of how they may identify politically.

[note my emphasis on "these days"]

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.

My family is liberal and not at all religious. Depending on where you grew up, that fact can either be a non-event or a defining part of who you are. In Queen Creek, Arizona, it meant everything.

I was regularly taunted by kids in my class who said that non-believers like me were going straight to hell. My mom took our Obama-Biden campaign sticker off our car after the second time it got keyed and I remember hearing the n-word in elementary school after Obama’s election. In sixth grade, I learned that a friend’s mom wouldn’t let her play with me if she knew I didn’t go to her church so I hid defining characteristics about myself—my three sisters and I had only ever been to church for my Catholic aunt’s wedding—in order to not be completely lonely.

I couldn’t wait to get out. I dreamed of going to Harvard, but was enamored with all of the old, storied New England schools. I loved watching “The Daily Show” with Jon Stewart and reading The Atlantic. I fantasized about finally feeling like I belonged.

So I worked hard in school. I have a single mom and we don’t have a lot of money, so I knew that I would have to score a near-full scholarship.

When I graduated high school at 16, my mom didn’t want to send me so far away so young. I enrolled in my local school, Arizona State University, and we both agreed that I could transfer out after my freshman year.

I arrived on Bryn Mawr’s campus, a Seven Sisters school in Pennsylvania, in the Fall of 2019. I was overjoyed. The campus was gorgeous, and, to this day, it is probably the most beautiful place I’ve ever seen in real life. There were gothic towers and acres of manicured lawns. I was eager to join the other nerdy girls and to find friends I’d have for life.

I’d gone to underfunded, overcrowded public schools my whole life and this was my first experience with small classes and teachers who seemed to love teaching. I took a poetry class where the professor would sing folk songs to us in the hallway as we made our way into class. I learned to write short stories from an Italian instructor who compared writing to preparing homemade pasta. I had been nervous about not being able to keep up academically, but the calculus class I took that first year was easier than the one at ASU.

Socially, it wasn’t entirely what I expected. The people at Bryn Mawr were the wealthiest and most liberal I had ever encountered. During my first week on campus, a girl I met suggested over dinner that 9/11 was justified because the United States had meddled in Middle East politics. She went on to say that the 9/11 memorial should be changed so as to show more respect to Muslims. One of the girls in my hall casually mentioned that Michelle Obama had been in a spin class she had taken in the Hamptons that summer. At first, I thought she was kidding.

I joined a sketch comedy group, which often started meetings by asking members to answer a question. One day, the question was “How is your semester going?” A few people answered directly, and then one girl said “I’m having a great semester, but I totally acknowledge that some students, especially BIPOC students, face a lot of challenges on campus.” Then, every person after her prefaced their answer by saying that students who aren’t white were probably having a worse semester than them.

I didn’t sit around with my friends all night arguing about big questions like I thought I would. It was assumed that we all agreed on the answers. But I made friends, and I loved my classes. I went to parties at nearby colleges, and I was making plans to study abroad in Ireland, which, as someone who had only left my home state twice, was a huge deal for me.

That was supposed to be in the Fall of 2020, but of course it never happened. I remember talking about the coronavirus on the way home from a party with my friend, a self-professed germaphobe, in January of 2020. She asked if I thought we should be worried. I told her that as a campus we should be more worried about binge drinking, and we both laughed. I thought that would be the end of it. Weeks later, Bryn Mawr announced that my spring semester would be held online.

The next few months were the worst of my life.

While many of my classmates retreated to their big houses on the East Coast or their family’s second homes, I moved home to our apartment in Tempe. There were two bedrooms between the five of us; myself, my mom, and my three younger sisters. At the time, I didn’t even have a desk where I could do my schoolwork and, regardless, I couldn’t escape the distraction of my younger siblings. Their schools were closed, too.

There was no library or coffee shop open to decamp to, and the internet in our building was shaky. But the poor connection was not my biggest problem. It was finding the motivation to attend online class as I watched everything I’d worked for evaporate.

Bryn Mawr’s Covid safety precautions for Fall 2020 were announced in July. They included, but were not limited to, isolating for 10 days prior to returning to campus and quarantining for two weeks upon arrival, living alone in a single dorm room, canceling all sporting events, weekly PCR testing, eating cafeteria take-out in our dorms, and wearing masks at all times, indoors and out. The masks could only be taken off with the door closed in our dorm room, or “outside in an area where you will not encounter others.”

If you did test positive, you were even further isolated to a dorm at the edge of campus, and food would be left at a drop-off point. I wanted to be at school, but why would I spend my days 1,600 miles away from my family, with no clubs or activities, eating alone in my dorm room, avoiding all social interaction?

So I stayed home for the entirety of my junior year, except for a trip back to campus to empty my room, and put my things—about $300 worth of clothes, bedding, and notebooks—in a storage unit nearby. I hoped I’d be back on campus soon. By the time I went to retrieve my things, the bill for the storage unit totaled well over $1,200.

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. I started sleeping a lot, but only during the day. I became scared of the dark. I lost my appetite, and 20 pounds along with it. There was nothing left to look forward to.

I stopped logging on to school, and my As and Bs turned to Fs. Ultimately, I decided to withdraw.

The stakes of leaving were high. I had to walk away from my $75,000 scholarship, my friends—everything. After a few weeks of being overcome with uncertainty, I started looking for schools that were more aligned with my values.

I quickly discovered that almost every school that was operating even remotely normally was overtly religious. That was really hard for me to wrap my brain around given I had a somewhat fixed view of conservatives being rigid and intolerant. Yet, here I was, confronted with the fact that these religious institutions were, in practice, far more aligned with my values like individual liberty, critical inquiry, and diversity of thought than the place that explicitly claimed to be those things.

In my admissions interview for Hillsdale, a small school of less than 1,500 students, founded by Baptists in Michigan, I praised Christopher Hitchens—a staunch and unapologetic atheist—as one of my intellectual heroes. I disclosed that I was not religious. I debated with my interviewer about whether math was invented or discovered.

And they wanted me anyway.
When I received that acceptance letter in November for the Spring 2022 semester, I cried.

I’ve been at Hillsdale for three weeks, and life here is blissfully normal. I have sorority sisters. We get together and study and play board games. The student union and dining hall are packed. No one asks anyone else’s vaccine status. There are no mask mandates, and no mandatory Covid testing. You'll see an occasional student in a mask but no one thinks anything of it.

Students and staff I’ve encountered disagree on the utility of masks and the danger of Covid, but it’s rarely the focus of conversation and certainly not the organizing principle of anyone's life. It feels like someone finally turned off the fire alarm that had been blaring for nearly two years.

I went to office hours—in person—the other day for one of my new classes, a required course about classic literature and I got into an interesting debate with a professor. Upon sharing an idea that directly refuted his interpretation of a line from Genesis, which I had never read before, he said, “That’s a great point. Why didn’t you share that in class?” “I didn’t want to be argumentative,” I told him. “Be argumentative,” he said emphatically.

Of course, there’s a serious social learning curve. I curse a lot, my classmates, generally, don’t. I get a lot of invitations to church services and Bible study, which I politely turn down. There is a distinct lack of PDA on campus. But I do not feel judged for thinking differently.

Someone on Twitter cited my migration to Hillsdale as an example of following an ideology to my own peril. I think just the opposite happened; I rejected an ideology and it set me free. When I stopped being scared to say what I really thought and surrounded myself with people who put their principles into practice, I was able to begin really thinking for myself.

There’s an alternate universe where Covid doesn’t exist, where I stay at Bryn Mawr and am never forced to learn these lessons or to confront my own limitations. I graduate believing that deep down there was something wrong with me for not seeing the world the way my peers did, and feeling ashamed for not being brave enough to voice my dissent. I am the same fearful girl I was at 10, who pretended to go to church so she could make friends.

My advice to upcoming high school seniors is this: try not to buy into the idea that any prestigious institution or affiliation will determine your future success. Credentials are no longer the proxy for knowledge that they once were; the internet has removed the gatekeepers of even the most specialized information. You don’t have to go to a particular college—or even college at all—to have a meaningful experience. Real growth isn’t about your GPA or the letters after your name; it’s about choosing discomfort and challenge rather than going along.

These past few years have introduced a lot of potential for regret and embarrassment, but instead, I was forced to embody the values I had previously only performed, like honesty and courage. In that respect, I’m glad this all happened. I know what I really believe. And I’m not afraid anymore.

Last edited by Belligerent Savant on Tue Feb 08, 2022 12:25 am, edited 3 times in total.
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Re: 'Liberals'/'Leftists' in America

Postby Belligerent Savant » Tue Feb 08, 2022 12:12 am

Joe Hillshoist » Mon Feb 07, 2022 11:03 pm wrote:
Belligerent Savant » 08 Feb 2022 13:10 wrote:.



Do you believe the media in the U.S. in today's climate is more Right-leaning, or Left-leaning (once more: I use the words "left" and "right" here as currently defined in mainstream culture)?


Why would you do that?

Nothing about the media is left wing and by using mainstream definitions you are playing into their bullshit matrix of control.

You've legitimised it.

You might call those people Liberal or Progressive, not left, they aren't synonymous. Far from it.

CNN is right wing.

NYT is right wing.

Mainstream media is right wing. End of story.


Yes, CNN, NYT and mainstream media is indeed right wing in the more traditional sense. Agreed.

But I'm not playing into anything. I'm having an open conversation in this sandbox called RI. I never typed that I in any way subscribe to any of the categorizations as currently defined by the mainstream, or accept any of these current definitions in my day-to-day dealings/interactions.

Unfortunately, many others do. There are many that proudly self-identify as "Liberals" that read NYT and NPR daily, religiously, and consider themselves LEFTISTS.

[As one example: a friend of mine, or perhaps more accurately, a former college roommate. We've kept in touch sporadically, and over the past couple years have engaged in ~weekly conversations (mostly via text message) about the latest covid-related hysteria. He's a 'public interest attorney' that works in NYC. Very pro-mask, very pro-mandate. very pro-vaccine passport, yet totally ok with the problems this creates for minorities and working classes in NYC, or rather, he refuses to address these contradictions; ignores them outright. Trusts the 'experts'. He would LAUGH at you and consider you delusional (blasphemous, really) for referring to the NYT as "Right wing". It's his primary source for covid news, along with NPR. THIS is the typical modern day "liberal". He's far from alone in expressing such sentiments within the broader NYC region. There's even more of his type out in Cali, Portland and Seattle, among other 'left-leaning' urban areas. How did this happen?]
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