Struggling with my political allegiance now and it's really bothering me

"this demo is being characterised as a ' far right' demonstration, and I don't want to be associated with that"

I no longer care about being associated with what people characterise. I know I'm not a horrible bigot for standing up for women's rights. Why should I care if someone calls me far right?

Apologies if this is already mentioned as can't read the whole thread this morning.

The way I see it is that

1. genuinely not all Tories are bastards (gasp!!). Many believe in similar core values, the difference is the route they conceive is necessary to get there. The reason I will never be a Tory isn't for tribal allegiances, it is because I fundamentally disagree with their economics and their stance on human behaviour.

2. whether by accident or design, there are real opportunities currently for the left to be weakened and divided. There are many players locally and globally who have a vested interest in that happening. Two of the ways the left are currently allowing themselves to submit to this are: by allowing the championing of free speech to belong to the right wing; by allowing the understanding of the physical and material reality of sex to belong to the right wing.

If you think about it the stance of some who self identify as left wing is absolutely ludicrous and not even logical. How can someone claim to be anti-fascist one moment and then work against free speech the next? How can someone (rightly) decry the murder of Palestinian journalists by Israel and then work to obscure the media reporting on the sex of violent offenders in the UK? How can someone criticise the lack of vital access to the internet in North Korea or Afghanistan and then work to prevent women speaking freely to each other in the UK?

TLDR it's great to consume stuff from all viewpoints. It's great to remain curious and questioning. But don't let other people's hypocrisy and logic deficiency put you off knowing what you know.

yes but a) GC people voting Green might dilute the madness a bit and b) I can't see anyone else taking the environment seriously at all. It is my absolute number 1 voting issue by far. It helps that I have a relatively sane local Green MP.

Louise Perry often says that gender ideology was transformative for her politically because she thought "if the left can be so wrong and so deranged on this one issue, how likely is it that they are right on everything else?"

I feel very similarly.

I’d trace it back to the legal systems- the European mainland has a lot of Napoleonic based systems, whereas England and Wales is Common law based. All the opt outs and so on couldn’t hide that the UK and NI was just a really bad legal fit (and should probably have stuck with a Switzerland style arms length agreement).

Brexit was my realisation that I wasn’t a Guardian reader any more. There was a lot of hatred of the provincial working class. There was no understanding that just because the EU was working very well for the degree-class, it didn’t mean it was working for the provincial working class. It was all ‘it’s good for us, so it’s good for you, and if you don’t agree it’s because you’re thick’.

And then came the Gender Wars and it was ‘Nope, the Guardian has lost it. They’re not reporting reality any more. They’re reporting what they think reality should be.’

I think try and know your values and look at things through that lens

I think many have lost any sense of a robust moral framework these days.

It's all just a very facile 'be kind' and responding to whatever cause is shouting the loudest and/or is the most fashionable.

Does it not bother you that they've allowed themselves to become so distracted by identity politics and list focus on the environment though?

These days the main thing they seem to be focused on is virtue signalling.

Yes, I agree.

Even when you do have a pretty good sense of the truth though it can get interfered with by the source of some information regarding it.£5

For example, sometimes teenagers find it difficult to do something their parents say is ‘right’ even if they secretly think it is too. Then they cut off their nose to spite their face. Similarly if you more or less hate someone, the instinct is to refuse to listen to anything they say - even if they say, ‘The sky is blue’, and it is!

I feel you. I vote Green because while I may be GC, I see climate change as the biggest challenge facing us the next couple of decades.

Sometimes it's hard to know what the truth is so people tend to use a shorthand - if X is saying it then it must be true cos I agree with X on so much. It's probably some sort of primitive tribal survival thing at work. Otherwise we would be on high alert all the time.

I listen to people I disagree with on a lot and occasionally find I agree with them on something or they make me examine my thoughts on something but it can be exhausting.

I think try and know your values and look at things through that lens.

A new book by Tom McTague (editor of New Statesman) argues the story goes back to Second World War, and traces Britain’s euro-ambivalence through all the debates that first took us in and then out agin. He thinks this is part of a longer story about history that isn’t finished yet. So Brexit wasn’t so much a cliff edge as an episode. I think that has a lot going for it as an argument.

The Brexit vote was quite early on in the day - back in 2016. The whole lead up began even earlier than that, with the perception that British people were being controlled by Germany and lacked sovereignty even though Britain had a number of opt out clauses in terms of the Euro, Schengen etc.

Then when it was voted through hate crimes against immigrants spiked and it feels that since then, antipathy toward immigrants in general has just steadily grown. It started with the Polish and has moved on.

Anti immigrant feeling in Europe and elsewhere appears to have surged later, particularly after Covid though every country is different.
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Last night I heard a programme about the famous 12th Century Jewish philosopher Maimonides. I was very struck by something he said which is apt for this question:

You must accept the truth from whatever source it comes

(Not always easy!)

Labour and Conservative are now two cheeks of the same arse. Look elsewhere to place your vote.

Oh definitely. Thinking back to the old days when porn was illegal in the UK and quite hard to get hold of, I'd instinctively have been on the libertarian side. But I didn't foresee what an online porn-addicted culture would lead to. We've gone way beyond Linzi Drew and Miss Whiplash in the 1990s highlighting conservative hypocrisy.

I'd like to sit down with some of the libertarians of that period and get their reflections on how things have gone. Anyway, when I see lefty men these days waxing lyrical about how empowering porn and prostitution are, I make some assumptions about their lives.

This is going back a bit and may seem a tangent, but I used to be a huge fan of Dennis Potter, and part of that is that Dennis got into TV drama in that quite narrow window when the BBC were willing to hire bright grammar school boys from working class backgrounds.

But one thing about Dennis is that, however much grief Mary Whitehouse caused him, he loved the idea of Mary Whitehouse. He liked that there was this little old lady in the Midlands who was a voice for all the other little old ladies in unfashionable parts of the country with ducks on their walls, and who the hell was Sir Hugh Greene to sneer at them, even if he agreed in principle with Sir Hugh Greene. It was a class thing.

I feel completely the same. I would still describe myself as “left wing” but really at a loss as to who I would vote for if they called a general election.

I am in Wales and we have Welsh government elections next year, I am seriously considering spoiling my ballot which I have never done before

Perhaps if the police spent less time prancing around bedecked in rainbows during Pride Month, erroneously informing the public over Twitter that misgendering is a hate crime, or arresting and interrogating a disabled woman in Cardiff over "transphobic stickers" and holding her in the cells for a day while they search her house and remove feminist books from her shelves, they might have more resources to devote to arresting the fuckers openly inciting violence against women in broad daylight?

Perhaps the time they have very publicly spent on these kinds of non-priorities has led the general public to believe that they have more resources than they know what to do with?

You're missing the point that emboldening grim little misogynists AND giving them social capital for it (because they're the 'right' sort of grim little misogynists) leads to bad outcomes for women generally.

So basically: nip the little fuckers in the bud balls. It's like arresting flashers prevents rapes down the line.

(How dare autocorrect turn my 'fuckers' into 'tuckers' - although ironically, some of them probably are! )

The problem is with the GC crowd is they seem to be under the misguided impression that:

A. Resources are infinite &
B. Think the world should revolves around them.

Now I know this may sound crazy but the way resource distribution works is they are usually divided up with top priorities first like actual serious crimes like murder & rape with threats that might occur thereafter. And as you might be aware (but not by the sound of it) there isn't enough already to go around for those more serious crimes. Are you seriously suggesting policing of more serious crimes &usually against women) be sidelined for placard threats? Doesn't sound very feminist centred to me.

That's not to say threats against anyone including Jews, Muslims or women etc shouldn't be investigated rather, real world limitations don't always make that possible rather than a conspiratorial plot to dud the 'GC's'.

Just to say I feel as you do OP. I can't help feeling it's existential - it's the death of hope. I'm hoping Blue Labour can gain ground but I'm not holding my breath.

I hold Labour responsible for the rise of the far right due to their obsession with identity politics while holding the white working class in contempt.
On the subject of algorithms I am getting feed from people I really disagree with and obsessively fact check just as I did when fed left wing content. If someone wants to recommend serious left wing thinkers - bring it on.

Disclaimer: I'm politically ignorant but starting to do a bit of reading since my DD is getting into politics... However, as I hadn't seen it mentioned yet, is anyone else interested in Tim Allen (formerly of Sex Matters) being recruited by Labour? Could this mean Labour are looking to position themselves as an option for GC ex lefties who don't want to go full on far right?

Well then you put your big boy pants stab vests on and you go into the crowd and you start picking people off until you've filled your police vans up with the little placard waving bastards and you take them down to the police station and you fucking fingerprint them all and you run them through the system and see if they already have a record and then you assess whether the behaviour that you witnessed meets the threshold to charge them with a crime or whether you'll have to let them off with a caution this time.

You know, good old fashioned policing. What the taxpayer is paying you for.

No, you won't get all the little fuckers every time, but if some of them get criminal records and lose their jobs, the others might think better of it next time.

Or you could throw your hands in the air and say, "oh no, it's just too difficult to get these trans activists to respect the laws of this country, let's send five armed police officers to Heathrow to arrest Graham Linehan and pick up some coffee and Krispy Kremes on the way back."

On the point of where feminism has gone, I find the whole Lily Philips and Bonnie Blue situations really problematic in terms of the progressive position of 'it's all fine as long as she consents'.

I can't look at what they're doing and decide that's a positive direction for them or womem generally

The American still using a yank online dictionary instead of an Australian/English one.

🙄

Yes, me too! I think it’s a book that needs to be written.