Smegg Wallace

@DemiColon we are often told on the left that any minority that works for the right is some kind of class or race traitor.

Which is quite classist and racist now I think about it.

I like Dan's yeti obsession and weird accent. You can have Andy, blonde geeks aren't my type, I like dark hairy cavemen (yetis)!! Yes they're not actively pushing the agenda, they just act like its totally normal to accept twaw, and I just quietly eyeroll every time I spot it. I can overlook it, only a few years ago I would have said the same.
As an aside, P!nk is getting closer to coming out as a terf. She has a few hidden suffragette flags in her set, and introduced a song in exasperation of how she gets accused of being trans because she's buff. She actually used the term "queenis" as in i get accused of having a queenis, then rolled her eyes. Got a huge fucking cheer for it. Then the video to accompany the song has suffragettes featured, and loads of original rainbow flags with not a trans flag in sight. This gives me hope that people are en masse becoming more familiar with the fundamentals of gender identity politics.

You mean right wingers who include, in your country, two female PMs, a non-white PM, Kemi Badenoch, people like Douglas Murray (gay), Andrew Sullivan, etc? Or in my country, the first (and only) female PM and the first black political party leader candidate? Or in the US Condoleeza Rice, Vicram Mansharamani, Thomas Sowell....

You get the idea.

Maybe the problem is that you have believed what is a very reductive progressive myth about conservatives?

OP, I'm with you. I also peaked fairly recently (in the last few months) and it really does change the way you see everything. I'm well aware that a lot of my friends would absolutely crucify me for "believing" in the reality of sex - indeed, I recently had a horrible argument with a sibling after I gently countered their assertion that "puberty blockers are a harmless pause button".

However - since (ashamedly quietly) voicing my thoughts about all of this with some friends and family, testing the waters as it were - I've realised that a lot of people agree with us, but are too scared to voice it. I think it goes back to the groupthink mentality. Certainly, I've also witnessed cognitive dissonance when I've brought the topic up: one person said, "Oh of course sex is real - there are men and women, and that's the way it is down to chromosomes... But it's not fair to say that someone who has transitioned isn't what they want to be." I think we've had the TWAW etc. messaging hammered so solidly that it will take a lot (and is taking a lot!) to re-establish reality in people's minds.

I think it's very easy to fall for the idea that because feminists[1] tend [2] to be left wing, then the left wing must be feminist. Which is very much not the case - the left as a whole has always had a strong strand of misogyny and 'after the revolution, love'. Sure, we'll look at women's rights - once the important things have been fixed.

And quite apart from beliefs not coming in unbreakable.bundles, to view it all as left-right is to ignore the other important axis of liberal-authoritarian. All of politics recently has moved a long way to the latter. The with-us-or-against-us of the left is as authoritarian and oppresive as the party currently banning protests.

When it comes to.The Guardian though, thinking that women's rights should be 'their territory' is not necessarily a left-right thing, but about their history. At one point - when Jill Tweedy was there and for a while afterwards building on her work - they were at the forefront of covering women's issues (and not using that phrase to.mean fashion and recipes). In recent times The Observer has upheld that legacy rather better than the main paper.

[1] At least for those of us whose first mental image when the word is mentioned is of the second wave.

[2] Although certainly not exclusively. And if you look back to first wave, the political spread was much wider - even if you limit your sample to the Pankhust family alone you have the whole range from fascist to communist.

I'm enjoying @OldGardinia posts. As I said on another thread, I have a lot to do with rural Tories and most of them are decent human beings. I might disagree with some aspects of their politics, but (as a bit of a wet centrist) I'm sick of the endless monstering of the Right. God knows, the Left has made enough enormous errors in its time. Wanting to build Utopia doesn't get you off the hook for millions of corpses.

Sowing division, where it needn't be sown, is destructive of society. This while gender issue is one where those on both Left and Right who have seen through it need to come together.

I think that was why I so enjoyed seeing Julie Bindel and Douglas Murray on the same podcast.

Right wing these days to some seems to mean anyone to the right of Corbyn 🤷🏻‍♀️. Those aren't “right wingers”. Terfs are largely left wingers, centrists and centre-right. Truly “right wing” are the equivalent of anti-fa on the far left. Don’t let Twitter deceive you. Even the current useless crop of conservatives are very much small c. That overton window has shifted quite a lot in the past 20 years. You’re not aligning with nazis, don’t worry.

Yes good point, and the way I've come to feel about the left recently is comparable to how I feel about believing in God - that in many ways I would like to but that I just don't. Once the faith collapses there's really nothing left.

Re right wing / left wing : I just want point out that the first woman MP in UK was elected on a Conservative ticket, selected and promoted by the party (not dissimilar to the first Jewish Prime Minister) .

‘o that’s different’ ….maybe. Or may it is all just ‘Divide and Conquer’. The Left/Right terminology relates to the seating positions in the French Revolutionary Assembly. Most of them ended up on the guillotine, ‘right’ or ‘left’.

‘Thinks’ may be a bit charitable here

In the absence of any other word....Lammy's the classic example of not engaging brain (or such brain as he has) before opening gob wide enough to put his foot in it.

‘Thinks’ may be a bit charitable here

Historically liberals and leftists have campaigned for women's rights. That's not to say that others haven't too, or that the territory is exclusive - just that they have. And should. If your politics is driven by a desire for genuine social justice and a fairer world order, women's rights are a prerequisite. They should be the first thing on the agenda, the sine qua non.

If you are driven by a commitment to individual and market freedom then you might well arrive at the same place in relation to women's rights. To my mind that centering of the individual and his/her freedom also underpins gender ideology and identity politics - which prioritises the individual and who they are, rather than the collective and what they do.

That obviously doesn't mean all people on the right are or should be TRAs! But prior to the arrival of gender ideology from the USA I don't think it would have been controversial to see gender stereotyping as the domain of conservative traditionalists and expect the left to be at the forefront of challenging them. That this hasn't happened is for me massive betrayal. These are broad trends and probably there is an element of team-think there, but for me what's being trashed is the vision of a fairer world.

The Labour party was formed in 1900 - from a coalition of trade unionists and socialists who had been galvanised by the harsh conditions many suffered in the factories and cities of the industrial revolution. It also had a big moment after the Second World War with the creation of the NHS - to compensate the people for the privations and sufferings of two world wars.

Omg that's your dd? She's fucking EPIC.

The Left villed the void for many in a society bereft of its former religious convictions. It offered the hope of a better world.

I think it's important to move away from this damaging idea that right = bad, left = good. That's part of what has gotten us into this shitshow in the first place.

If I agree with something that Jordan Peterson says, that doesn't mean I automatically want to be his friend and agree with everything he believes. Such immature thinking.
That sort of tribalism and shutting people down is one of the reasons that others are so afraid of saying what they think - 'oh, I can't possibly listen to him, he's right wing'. But really, you're never going to find a single person in this world who agrees with absolutely everything you think.

Especially when what we are talking about is not just opinion, but fact. It is biological fact that men cannot be women, that humans can't change sex. That's not a right or left wing issue, it's not even a moral issue (no matter how much some people try to claim it is), it's just reality. And ignoring that reality has consequences.

If someone is going to fight you on reality, and then claim the high ground because they vote Labour and read the Guardian, that's not coming from a place of rationality, but something else.

marketing

Rather than moving on from shallow consumerism and the marketisation of the body, we seem to have become ever more entrenched in it; in fact I'd suggest gender ideology, itself, stems from a post modernistic theory which itself is a product of the marketplace. -which seeks the freedom for an individual to create or purchase their 'best true self' . It is just over-hyped, Californified marekting bullshit.

And OldGardinia is making a good point:

I'm sad about it too op. Pretty much all the faith I had in the left has gone.

Whereas the archetypal 'right winger' actually seems to value motherhood and the family.

And that because black smoke came from the conclave of cardinals (signifying they hadn't yet agreed on who to elect as pope) it was racist to report it.

https://www.standard.co.uk/news/politics/david-lammy-mocked-for-fuming-at-racist-bbc-after-report-on-sistine-chapel-s-black-and-white-smoke-8532676.html

He also thinks that ULEZ isn't a problem for tradesmen, they can just get on the Tube with all their kit and equipment.

The Left also seems to be more rejecting of 'woman' as biologically based because it sees the female body as an oppression to be escaped.

Yes, hatred and automatic rejection of any idea or thought which can be instantly rejected on account of being 'right wing' actually displays an ignorance of what motivates many people who may be categorised as on the political right. It is always assumed that anything considered right of centre is based on negative discrimination and lack of tolerance - when this is no more the case than it is in any other grouping.

Increasingly I see the left as devaluing women because the focus seems to be only on equality - where equality means sameness, and absorption into the dominant capitalist/consumeristic ethic.

i'm increasingly convinced there can be no equality unless differences are recognised and then accommodated, rather than feeling everyone has to be seen as, and treated, in exactly the same way as everyone else.