Do you ever wonder, what else have I been horribly wrong on all this time?

The salary is guaranteed is the current “universal credit” btw. If there are no checks on it (you have it for life with no rules), even if it’s minimal money not to starve, many people will chose it, as they have done under communism, especially as the time goes by.

Many are just happy to play video games and eat chips until they die. You don’t have to do this for long, just start young, become socially impaired, but have your porn and UC, all good.

Or maybe become an incel, go out with a bang killing as many women as possible when you can’t handle your depression anymore, or watch forced feminisation hentai (a form of Japanese porn) and develop other mental illnesses ;) (just check everyday Twitter accounts with prepubescent anime girls as their profile pic, see what they are into and what activism they have)

On other news, Canada has just approved assisted dying for the mentally ill from next March :))

Canada is ahead of the herd on so many things ;), including totalitarian measures like freezing the bank accounts of protestors, supporting “gender expression”, even for those so inclined to wear prosthetic fetish breasts etc. But what a handsome face the soft totalitarianism has.

You still have empathy after the leftist and the communists know very well their theory doesn’t translate at all to human realities? And they still promote it?

”Each according to their need and each according to their ability.”something a teenager without any history knowledge or knowledge of human psychology would believe in.

I’d have empathy for this teenager and if communism wouldn’t have proven time and time again how bad it is.

leaving aside this claim, that actually doesn’t work in reality*, what communism does, and what the left is doing right now, is to install a new class in power, replacing the “bourgeoisie” with a political ideological class that is the holder and inforcer of the “Truth”. Initially these are good people that have arrived at the Truth and are doing good, even for the “deplorable” masses who don’t get it “yet”. But only initially. They get infiltrated by ppl who see this is the way to power, influence, and eventually just food.

As member of this class, and even of the little people, as this ideology breaks with the reality on the ground, and the need to cover up the truth of what is actually happening, the need to lie, to change language, to police behaviour, speech and yes, even thoughts, grows bigger and bigger.

The members of the political class are not exempt. They eat their own, they cater to the most “triggered” among them, grudges are paid back etc. this infighting is always happening, no one trusts no one, everyone is under scrutiny, the truth can’t be mentioned, problems need to be covered up, and it just escalates and escalates…

You can see this happening now, it has started with political correctness (good ppl doing good, good intentions, etc), moved into critical race theory and gender ideology. Conflicts can’t be acknowledged, definitions need to be changed (racism now means structural racism, woman/man who knows what). No problems will be (and maybe can’t be) solved, like male violence pattern same for all subgroups, black poverty.

But as long as people feel good and have control of the language and the power structures to shut down dissent, it’s all good in their world.

In many European countries it took up to 50 years for problem to become glaring. So in 50 years, will be apparent to everyone males still offend lie, they always have been, no one has done anything practical to solve black poverty, more it has continued to increase (as problems that are not addressed do). All this inclusivity and taking the knee (empty action) has done nothing, more women/girls/minorities suffer than when it started.

Women and girls would have changed behaviour by then, restricting their public life, going in pairs, stop participating in sports, etc.

Another issue, left and communism always increase poverty as well, across the board. China has managed to avoid this by introducing a form of capitalism, but the West if gets their way, with both unchecked capitalism that increases the divide between the rich and the poor and with measures like universal credit, will only increase poverty.

*”Each according to their need and each according to their ability.”

• I’m from a former communist country. In my father’s factory there was a guy who always came drunk and didn’t work, just showed up. He was working according to his “ability “ + everyone had “the right to work”, so he couldn’t be fired. Absurd? Comical? Well look at trans ideology.. This happened decades after communism was introduced, maybe it was a consequence of ideology going mad, maybe this happened from the start, I don’t know. As a consequence, how many people felt inclined to actually work?
• Even without a guy like that, who can actually tell what is someone’s actual “ability” is - so work for as little as you can or not at all, salary is guaranteed. The economy will get worse, but this will become apparent decades later (depending on how rich in resources the country was initially ). You just have to make your end of year figures look good for the party.
• or who can tell what is someone actual need is? Even if you don’t have a physical ability, if you can bribe a doctor to give you a pass for a mental illness (everyone needed food or other perks you couldn’t find otherwise, no matter how hard you worked - the irony), so if you were the son of the city’s mayor, you could bribe your way to anything. Or if your mum could steal enough chickens from the farm, maybe not enough for a steady life payment, but for many things.
• these are just a few ex from the top of my head, many ppl have written better on this, I’m not saying anything new
• this happens when and because there is no free speech, all kinds of madness, corruption can grow under the umbrella of PC speech, and they can’t be exposed, so they only grow worse.
• free speech is the best tool and disinfectant and prevention we have, as we can’t change people from overcoming to cults, ideologies and the like. If that’s gone, all will go.

Im so mad of ppl still having empathy, still seeing the “good” in communism, still hankering for utopias that can’t exist unless humans evolve to Star Trek levels, etc.

maybe you or your children will get to experience it here in uk as well, not the same but a form of totalitarian ideology, as it’s going that way. Will see how much empathy you will have left at the end of it. With with tech control, there might be no end to it any time soon.

I have every empathy for leftists and even communists. After all communism is essentially how a decent healthy family operates. Each according to their need and each according to their ability. However if the 20th Century has taught us anything it scales terribly.

Personally I sit slightly right of centre as notions that go too far to the extreme right or the extreme left are deeply troubling. I found it distasteful when McDonnell brandished Mao’s little red book. As bad as if someone on the right wing waved around Mein Kampf.

Certainly this feeling that 'the Left is good' is very widespread in academia. I heard one aging Marxist make the argument that criticising communist China about e.g. Mao's famine was a mean thing to do, because they were following a utopian dream and that was the important thing (not the millions of dead).

Yes and this isn’t new. I remember as an Orwell-loving teenager, so nearly 40 years ago pre the fall of the Berlin Wall, being baffled at lefties I knew refusing to hear a word said against east Germany or Cuba, because they were left-wing and therefore ideal utopias. I’m not saying communism is always all bad either, I’m sure it’s complicated, but it’s not as if we didn’t know they could be violent oppressive regimes, yet some left-wingers wouldn’t countenance that. It blew my mind, that people would so determinedly prioritise ideology over the facts staring them in the face. Think I’m a bit older and wiser now…

@RedToothBrush
Prior to the fall of the Berlin Wall we had also had awareness that the Stasi and the Communists in the USSR weren't that nice. But since it fell, I don't believe there is the same level of understanding of how totalitarianism on the left is as problematic as on the right. It just isn't taught to the same degree.

I 100% agree. I've read widely on communism, down to the level of the odd memoir by a communist leader, and apparently it's okay to lie and deceive in pursuit of The Revolution. It's okay to run Gulags and kill the opposition before holding 'a free election'.

Certainly this feeling that 'the Left is good' is very widespread in academia. I heard one aging Marxist make the argument that criticising communist China about e.g. Mao's famine was a mean thing to do, because they were following a utopian dream and that was the important thing (not the millions of dead).

Yes, his long march of the institutions analysis is spot on, I think.

Torunette

Yes, and ultimately what you see is that the state and these non-state actors work in concert. And the fact that multi-national corporations can control more funds than many nations makes the power dynamic quite different than just business. It's possible to have non-state bodies, or state bodies take the lead, depending on what is more palatable and effective at a particular place and time.

Though I do think that the take-over of the Labour Party by the professional middle classes is also a significant cover for the problems of movement of labour. They see Brexit as a significant curtailment of their ability to go work in a professional position, or their kids to go to university, on the continent. Because they have the kinds of jobs and educations where that is desirable and make the kind of money where they can still fly home to see family regularly. But that's not the reality of freedom of labour for the working classes and never was.

It makes me wonder a little to what extent that change was intentional.

I am right wing, but heavens no you won’t be wrong on everything. The left serves a
very important role in giving voice to people who have less power and agency.

In fact in my view a healthy society requires women and men of good conscience to advocate the respective left/right wing positions on debates.

I agree this baddies vs goodies angle of political discourse is reductive, divisive and just plain wrong most of the time. Both sides have their heroes and villains.

I feel deeply conflicted on the trans issue myself. I generally like to advocate a live and let live position. However the misgivings people have I understand. What seems to be the biggest problem is male violence towards women, girls, and even trans people. If we tackled THAT a great many things would fall into place, but we just don’t address it enough as a society.

If you've never changed your mind about something them there is something wrong with you. I never thought I'd vote Tory to protect women's rights but here we have landed.

How did so many organisations, the NHS, the police, government, even human rights organisations take on board, so quickly, without question trans ideology?

As well as some of the other reasons given, it's because it hasn't been quickly. I used to be staggered by how stupid, unquestioning and intellectually un-curious the leaders of our institutions have been, to have taken on this ideology so full of holes and contradictions, which can be knocked down so easily. i thought they must know this stuff is bollocks but they're too cowardly and irresponsible to stand up for what's right. Would have been Mitlaufer in 1933 etc.

But recently I've been watching videos by this guy James Lindsay, who did that Grievance studies paper where he and his colleague came up with preposterous ideas related to critical race theory, which they thought would be rejected by academics in peer review and not only was the paper welcomed, the academics came back to say that they hadn't gone far enough and should be madder.

He's got lots of lectures on YouTube, that's a link to one of them I haven't listened to yet, but basically his argument is that all this Critical Social Justice stuff (CRT, trans-ideology, decolonisation, identitarianism etc.) has been going on for years, starging as part of the 70s - 80s marxist revivalism (I now understand why this term "cultural marxism" which I previously thought nonsensical) is used and that the teaching colleges have been indoctrinating students in this stuff and it's now worked its way through so that its believers are now in positions of power. It's not that it's a sudden conversion, it's that they now have enough critical mass to feel they can show their hand in a way they couldn't before.

It all sounds a bit tin hat, but i do actually think that the alternative explanation is that the cadre of leaders we have is utterly cowardly, stupid and over-promoted.

Possibly a bit of both...

As was the late Bob Crow.

I have very conflicting feelings about Brexit. I know, for example, that the freedom of movement of people was a sop to the European left back in the day, who were severely alarmed by the consequences of the freedom of movement of capital.

Notice how absolutely no-one ever spoke or speaks about that principle. Ever. Yet freedom of movement of capital is the one that supercharged late 20th century capitalism and partially got us into the unholy economic mess we are now in.

Indeed, arguing for freedom of movement of people across Europe in response to serious concerns over freedom of capital has to be the most economically right-wing position I have ever come across. It is "get on your bike" writ large over 3.9 million square miles. Even Tebbit would have thought that ridiculous.

And I deeply feel that the freedom of movement principle was never intended to benefit the ordinary Brit right from the start. If we had had governments that wanted the EU to work for the British people, then instruction in a number of the major European foreign languages would have been implemented at primary school level, as they are in other European countries.

In short, we would have a society where pretty much everyone born since 1979 would speak, at least, one European language, in addition to their mother tongue of English. And to those that believe this is a big ask; historically, the British have been polyglots. We were known for it during the Tudor period. There's no reason for us to be so monolingual at all.

I think what is being pushed for heavily is the concept of the "post-nation state." I've been reading some interesting ideas recently about how corporations are actually implementing forms of authoritarianism in western societies, but no one is notices because the social, cultural and economic changes they have achieved are not by state dictat. As societies, we have been programmed to see authoritarianism as a function of a repressive state or government, not companies, charities, or some other form of legal non-governmental body.

Of course, on this board, we do see it because we have examined the main players that are pushing gender identity ideology. But then that poses the question: what else is happening out there that is similar that we just don't see?

With all this in mind, I often find myself giving a nod to the old Marxists in their 70s who rail that everything is a rightwing nightmare - because, to be honest, they are right. This doesn't mean I'm some sort of communist though. It means I recognise that a lot of anarcho-capitalist demands are being driven through western societies under the cover of the "left", and the "left" is letting them do it because they have been blinded by a fear of "isms".

I think today’s gender identity politics is a hyper capitalist, solipsistic men’s sexual access to women and children campaign, rocket fuelled by social media. It’s an instinctive reaction based in overt or internalised misogyny in its supporters. It’s a reaction against the gains in power or freedom that some women have made in the past few decades, which is why it’s happening across supposedly free democracies etc. Remember that any loss of access to privilege can feel like repression.

And don’t ignore that gender identity politics is also supported by ALL of the major parties (in the UK at least) apart from the communists who never went down that road. The communists are about as left wing as you can get.

So It’s clearly not just a ‘left wing’ vs ‘right wing’ problem, OP, and if we try to tackle it that way this culture war will go on even longer.

Maya Forstater and Keira Bell (crowdfunded by many people on this board) have done far more for women’s legal rights on this issue at the moment than ANY politician in the UK has. JKR the same, on prompting the public discussion of this issue. They were unaffiliated to any political party.

So I’d be very wary of switching your political allegiances to any party that can’t point to its own strong track record of manifesto policies that are supporting both appropriate safeguarding for women and children, and free speech for all. No UK political parry is doing that at the moment.

Yeah that stuff was crazy.

But personally, I think the EU, to work long term, will have to become more like a nation itself. Otherwise the tensions of each state trying to serve their own interests will end up making it unworkable.

Cultures like that can do some pretty extreme things in the name of the good of the group, though. I'd be interested to know how that fits into the idea of "good" and "bad".

I just read this and thought it was interesting:

'Ruth Benedict, the anthropologist, tried to figure out why some cultures are good (to use her word) and some cultures are not good. In a good culture, men treat women well, adults treat children well, people are generally happy, and there's not a lot of competition. She found that the good cultures all have one thing in common. They figured out something very simple: they recognize that humans are both social creatures and selfish, and they merge selfishness and altruism by praising behaviors that benefit the group as a whole and disallowing behaviors that benefit the individual at the expense of the group. The bad cultures socially reward behavior that benefits the individual at the expense of the group.
This culture rewards highly acquisitive, psychopathological behavior, and that is the behavior we see.'

(from 'deep green resistance' )

@MangyInseam if only they’d be working together for mutual benefit… remember when they stole PPE from each other during the covid pandemic?! Stopped and stole trucks with PPE meant for another EU country. I remember several did this, but not which ones.

I say this again and again. In the past, it was common for Labour Party supporters to be anti-EU. It was a recognized, maybe majority perspective on the left.

And to a large extent when you dig into it, that's about the question of how a nation-state can function to serve the good of the people who are citizens, which is the primary function of the nation-state.

Nation-states working together for mutual benefit has always happened and institutions can facilitate that, but as soon as you are creating a situation where nation-states may not be able to act for the best interests of their own citizens, you have a problem.

Grammarnut, Interesting what you were saying about the unions and the EU. It reminded me that at the time of the referendum campaign Mick Lynch of the RMT, currently the figure of the hard man we associate with train strikes, was an advocate for leaving. He was one of the few on the left.

RedToothBrush - I agree entirely. As a current member of the Labour Party I despair of them, too. The left has this halo of being right and it frequently - esp lately - is not. Leaves me nowhere to go.

I'm only on p3 but want to say how wonderful MN can be for platforming such thorough discussion and suggestion for further material to muse upon. Absolutely agree with the idea that I'll never have all the answers. Unfortunately it seems like we're expected to. I find it interesting (just an emerging thought) that in other areas- sport, learning an instrument, developing an eye for literary criticism, whatever - we accept that we're at the beginning and will always be learning, debating, to-and-fro-ing with others who have their own areas of skill and expertise, and we accept that we can't know everything, and yet we think we do on the topics that are urgent and affecting, or painted so. I think I've realised I need to keep my mouth shut and accept I know nothing, even when there's pressure to 'speak out' - there's always more to come, and we never have access to the full picture. I don't have to have an opinion on everything and it's alright not to know everything. Bursting out of the cake too soon with declarations has never been the right move for me.

I've said this before but I call this a 'Liberal Identity' which is exclusive and completely separate to liberalism.

The two are not the same and the conflation is one of these hijacking of language things to further ideology.

Again positively authoritarian thing in nature.

I've been saying on MN for a long time now that the trans stuff and the attitude of the LDs to Brexit are not actually liberal.

Thats kind of my point.

The meaning of the word has been high jacked to mean a certain set of prescribed values - that's authoritarianism. Whereas liberalism as it was understood isn't actually about set values as such but the principles of consensus and balancing needs of various different groups.

Identity politics absolutely isn't liberal. It creates an alternative hierarchy systems. Hierarchical systems are by nature authoritarian.

@RedToothBrush i agree

@Grammarnut i was anti Brexit at the time, but I’ve came to the same conclusion as you since. I was also one of those who argued against democracy and how to reverse Brexit. Probably for a year or 2 after. Now I wonder why. How could I think that when I’m anti totalitarianism, pro democracy? I think it’s bc the left always think they know best. And I thought the same at the time…

@CherryBlossomWinter “How did so many organisations, the NHS, the police, government, even human rights organisations take on board, so quickly, without question trans ideology? I think it was mainly emotional blackmail and bullying, the sort that said if you don’t take this on board right now, in the way that ‘we’ say, you will cause untold suffering of trans gender people. It has the fervour of a cult, and now ‘gender’ is presented as if it is an actual fact. How did this happen?”

the emotional blackmail is one of the reasons.

it also happened bc here people are too polite to say what they think in case they upset someone + it has been drummed into them that the British were so evil in the past (the empire etc) ( same for USA/Canada ) that they should be extra sensitive, apologetic, etc. while it started with a good intention it has quickly become a way to stifle free speech. This is across the board, not just for trans issues.

I just think we have really lost the core, and got very wound up in neo liberalism and hitching onto ideologies which looked glossy and progressive, alongside a weird inability to tackle any voices of debate.

JK Rowling is what woke me up (excuse the pun!) to the insidious but dangerous aggressive bullying that is now the norm for getting liberal ideologies to be taken on board without question. She still has not said anything in my view that is so awful - and yet so many ‘liberal’ nice people are prepared to support those who are bullying and piling on hate - which I found profoundly shocking.

How did so many organisations, the NHS, the police, government, even human rights organisations take on board, so quickly, without question trans ideology? I think it was mainly emotional blackmail and bullying, the sort that said if you don’t take this on board right now, in the way that ‘we’ say, you will cause untold suffering of trans gender people. It has the fervour of a cult, and now ‘gender’ is presented as if it is an actual fact. How did this happen?

We have lost what it is to be liberal, to be decent, respectful and have integrity. We have lost those core values and instead hitch ourselves onto tick boxes instead. I think we have lost this in family set ups, in workplaces and in education. Core values are the key, not ideologies which generally have a dark side especially if taken to extreme (see communism for a classic example).

RedToothBrush, Sadly, rationality is in short supply. I voted to leave the EU for much of what you said, it was rights for the worthy and rights for those with the power to lobby. This may not be obvious until you see the interplay between freedom of movement, the right of establishment and the right of unions to protect their workers. The rights of unions was often put aside in favour of the two freedoms: of movement of labour (so an employer can employ ready-trained or cheap labour instead of training locally and paying the local going rate) and freedom of establishment, which has been allowed to undercut union representation to keep wages and conditions just and also has been a way to strip out manufacturing from e.g. the UK to benefit other countries the EC/EU wished to promote. I don't disagree with helping other nations but not to the detriment of ones's own since this is not likely to increase anyone's prosperity and will negate aid to others.

Education is needed about liberalism, but liberalism is also not all good. Some aspects e.g. the imposition of trans ideas, does not help society and may inflict damage on large parts of society which are nonetheless vulnerable, such as women who have much less power than men and who are in danger of losing much worked for rights in the name of male empowerment. Liberal is not always right, sometimes conserving what is good is right, generally expressed as not throwing out the baby with the bathwater. I am particularly unhappy with the liberal view that democracy is not always the correct way to go - epitomized by the LibDems saying they would disregard the result of a referendum that said the UK should not stay in the EU - and also with the technocratic government - ignoring the will/wish of the people - which the EU goes in for. Doing to people what you think is good for them is just as tyrannical as doing to them what is bad for them.