The Liberals response to TRAs shows why Brexit/Trump won

[cista]

At least I think so....

All this #nodebate, "transwomenarewomen", "terfblocker", "bigot", "transphobe", "penisphobe", "transistor", "lalalala! I can't hear you"...

Is quite similar to how some liberals were in the run-up to Brexit/ Trump.

"If you vote leave, you're racist."

"If you don't vote Hilary, you're a misogynist!"

"I refuse to debate with anyone that supports Trump/ Brexit"

And what happened? People voted how they wanted and the ring-wing won.

Any mention of George Soros sets off the alarm for me now. I immediately wonder if I'm reading the posts of 'EU-Lizards-elite-whatever new nonsense I can come up with' bots. I'm thinking the link with the Trans debate is a something I didn't see coming. Genuinely innovative.

I've posted this on a few threads but noones discussed it with me yet, maybe this will be the thread....
www.google.co.uk/amp/s/www.newstatesman.com/politics/uk/2017/09/how-modern-addiction-identity-politics-has-fractured-left%3famp
"Identity politics on the left was at first about large classes of people – African Americans, women, gays – seeking to redress major historical wrongs by mobilising and then working through our political institutions to secure their rights. By the 1980s, it had given way to a pseudo-politics of self-regard and increasingly narrow, exclusionary self-definition that is now cultivated in our colleges and universities."
"The main result has been to turn young people back on to themselves, rather than turning them outward towards the wider world they share with others. It has left them unprepared to think about the common good in non-identity terms and what must be done practically to secure it – especially the hard and unglamorous task of persuading people very different from themselves to join a common effort. Every advance of liberal identity consciousness has marked a retreat of effective liberal political consciousness."

I don't think I agree with that, Quentin. I think it's very polemical and not so nuanced.

It seems to hearken back to an idealised Golden Age, where Leftie politics were unified - but I remember that time as one in which Leftie = white and male and centred on economic/class politics. Anything else was a 'distraction' from The Cause. If you weren't a white male, it didn't feel terribly outward looking.

The 'fractures' were 'distractions' like feminism, anti-racist movements, gay rights movements, calling on the Left for recognition.

Take feminism as a for instance. Did feminism mean that women stopped working for the Labour Party? Did that particular fracturing mean that women became more inward looking, unable to make connections or call for solidarity? Or did women go on doing a lot of the work in the Party, alongside working for feminism? Do women who identify as feminist still manage to put in the hours working for refugee rights, and working in food banks, etc? I think they do.

Anyway, that's my tuppence worth, Quentin. It's certainly an article to get people talking.

I suppose I can see that e.g. the gay movement has gone from LGB when I was young to LGBT to LGBTQ and now the alphabet soup that means basically anyone.
Feminism was just feminism, then radical/liberal now intersectional, Marxist, ecofeminism, all the way to anything a woman does is feminism.

When they say the Left, I interpreted that as politics to reduce inequality rather than individualistic politics (the Right). Maybe I got the wrong end of the stick though. I'm politically interested but not educated :)

Am I allowed to confess that the addition of letters to LGBTQ+ makes me smile a little? Or does that make me both bad and twee?

I'm OK with it, though. And I think the ideal should be people with nuanced social and political identities coming together to work for specific goals but not feeling coerced into going along with others - which might be against their interests - because they have to sacrifice part of their identity to be in a (relatively unnuanced) political group.

That's the ideal. I suspect it very rarely feels so simple and unacrimonious.

The trouble with identity politics is that it can feel absolutely psychologically devastating when conflicts arise.

thecatfromjapan Any mention of George Soros sets off the alarm for me now.

One of the key priorities for Soros' Open Society Foundation is subjective gender identity. This is not about lizards, it's about doing some basic research on the Foundation's website.

Look at this document:
www.opensocietyfoundations.org/sites/default/files/communities-against-hate-front-line-organizations-20170313.pdf
It lists US$390,000 to trans ors, from just one income stream.

Look at this document laying out the plan to get subjective gender identity in schools in 2015:
www.opensocietyfoundations.org/sites/default/files/lgr_trans-children-youth-20151120.pdf
Note especially the deployment of 'anti-bullying' discourse which has since been mobilized very effectively in UK. Note also how the objection that girls won't want boys in their toilets is strategically addressed.

OMFG, if ONLY we could have no-platformed the bloody Leavers with half the effectiveness the TRAs manage, we wouldn't be in this mess. As it happens, I've never seen a single Leave voter bloody silenced anywhere.

@SeaChanges who are the other billionaires bankrolling trans activist and how do you know that they are?

(1) Soros as above.

(2) Jennifer Pritzker, ex-military, recently became TIM. Funding includes Professorship of Gender Studies in Canadian university (appointee was trans obv!) and a gender identity clinic for kids in Chicago. Website:
www.tawanifoundation.org

One of his top people was Indra Lusero who subsequently took over US Midwives Association and then changed terminology to birthing parents etc.

(3) Jon Stryker. Gay man, his motivation is unclear to me (whereas Pritzker is obvious and Soros also makes ideological sense, for reasons that echo the OP!). Look at the Arcus Foundation online.
www.arcusfoundation.org

Grants include $1m to Transgender Europe, which does the trans day of remembrance. So if you're wondering why British organizations officially commemorate dead Brazilian TIM sex workers rather than (say) British women killed by their husbands/boyfriends, one reason is that Transgender Europe has a lot more money than Karen Ingala Smith!

P.S. This podcast is quite useful:
wlrnmedia.wordpress.com/2017/08/03/edition-16-the-money-behind-the-trans-movement-and-impact-on-lesbians/

Often mentioned in this context is a super wealthy and super creepy TIM called Martine Rothblatt (highest-paid "female" CEO a few years back). But I've seen no evidence that he funds transactivism.

I think it is exactly the sort of thing that happens when people are not listened to, or shamed for voicing concerns. Most people just quietly take their vote elsewhere.

The "basket of deplorables" incident was particularly significant as it revealed what Hillary really thinks about most of the US population, many of whom had previously been a safe vote for the Democratic party. Her utter disdain for them was deeply distasteful.

OK, this is the stuff about the Mercer project I mentioned yesterday.

(This thread is about the nature of the discourse, so after thinking about it, I realise this does belong here.)

You can see why I said destablization is a spot-on description of much of the alt-right project. And that funding people like Yiannopoulos is NOT to support eg gay rights, but merely to use him to disrupt.

Long article, worth reading:

In the stodgy world of the cultural right, Milo Yiannopoulos stood out like a neon, designer-branded peacock. He was vulgar in a way that the old-school, Moral Majority-era conservatives could not tolerate: gay, brash, self-admittedly promiscuous, and frank about his innumerable biases, racial and otherwise. He was sacrilegious, famously causing his own downfall at Breitbart when a video of him appearing to defend pedophilia surfaced on the Internet. He dressed like a Kardashian, deliberately distancing himself from the Brooks Brothers-loving Young Republicans. In other words, he was the kind of disruptive presence that Robert and Rebekah Mercer wanted to boost in their attempt to accelerate the so-called culture war. With Ted Nugent far out of the demo, he was the right’s young pop star, a whole new thing.

As the billionaire father-daughter duo behind Breitbart and, later, Donald Trump, the enigmatic Mercers flex their muscles much like the rest of their wealthy conservative mega-donor ilk: by sitting on think-tank boards, backing super PACs, funding scholarships, and donating to candidates. But the Mercers also think rather differently from their peer group, acting as angel investors for projects they hope will shift the cultural conversation. In 2012, they invested $10 million in Breitbart and then watched it turn into a blazingly offensive news organ for pro-Trump opinions; with the founding of Milo Inc. this year, they hoped to break into the next generation.
[...]
In keeping with their goal to construct a parallel cultural universe, the Mercers, according to one person with direct knowledge of their fund-raising activities, were curious to see whether Yiannopoulos could create a media empire that could bring in younger voters, make money, and drive a wedge in the culture war.

www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/10/mercers-money-milo-yiannopoulos-conservative

Shorter, includes quick sketch of Bob & Rebekah Mercer:
www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/02/renaissance-technologies-robert-mercer-donald-trump

White supremacist stuff:
www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/05/robert-mercer-david-magerman-lawsuit

RadicalFern, Clinton didn't describe most of the US population as deplorables.

She described people who were "racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic," as deplorables.

It didn't work for her politically to say it out loud (although it didn't stop her getting more votes than Trump) but... do you disagree with her description?

Or is "telling it like it is" and "only saying what other people are thinking" only a virtue when it's racists saying it about other people?

BTW it's obviously not right to use terms like "racist" or "sexist" or "homophobe" as meaningless insults to people one doesn't like.

But when talking about actual racists, I do actually think it's OK to call them racist and to find many of them deplorable. Even while wanting to understand what makes them tick.

People voted how they wanted and the ring-wing won.

You're not suggesting that Brexit is the right wing and the anti-Brexit is the left wing are you?

You must know that's not true.

For me, the shutting down of debate is coming from the brexiters:

Transwomen are women = brexit means brexit.
Ignoring biology = ignoring economics.
Asking about details - 'we won' get over it.

Living in a crazy unicorn land is something that happens to people when they don't or can't think through issues clearly, left or right.

Frankly, I think the whole narrative of "I voted Leave because the Remainers made me do it" is utter bollocks. I hear it repeated on MN all the time, but I have yet to see a MNer actually say that's why she voted Leave. It would, of course, be genuinely silly to vote for such economic devastation for whole regions of the UK for those regions.

Exactly.

I voted Remain as a eurosceptic old school leftie who isn't keen on the pro-austerity, pro-market aspects of the EU but saw it as a frying pan and fire thing - better in than out even though in isn't utopia by any stretch.

I think a great many people who voted Leave accurately identified the fact that their lives have got worse over the last few decades and also accurately identified that the Remain crew weren't really proposing any solutions to their problems - deindustrialisation, housing, etc. I think that they less/in-accurately identified a) EU rules and regulations and b) freedom of movement as the main causes of why their lives had got worse.

I think the Remain campaign got it wrong to tell people that immigration was a net benefit to society - this may well be technically true but telling people whose lives are worse than they were that things are actually getting better doesn't win them around. Some Remainers were also contemptuous of Leave voters, calling them racist, xenophobic and ignorant. This doesn't win anyone around.

I am sure part of the Leave vote was racist, xenophobic and ignorant. But it certainly wasn't all 52% of it. And if Remain had played it better, things could have gone the other way. Which would have been so much better for the country.

Very interesting PerkingFaintly

That "de-stabilisation" could also be called shit stirring, couldn't it?

It would be impossible for wealthy, shady forces to predict exactly what the consequences of one little tweak of the (very complex) system here could have, which is why I don't buy into big conspiracy theories, but it would be fairly easy to stir up divisions if you had the money and inclination. It is always far easier to destroy than to create.
It is therefore entirely plausible that those who want to do so are exploiting and exacerbating the Trans movement to stir up shit . Its got nothing to do with them being in favour of LGBT rights.

LangCleg, I agree with very much of that post.

I am sure part of the Leave vote was racist, xenophobic and ignorant. But it certainly wasn't all 52% of it.

Leave won by getting the narrow group of a few percent in the middle to edge over onto the Leave side. I'd expect Leave had already captured the racist, xenophobic and ignorant.

Okay, going to come out of the closet here - I'm an old school eurosceptic lefty who voted leave. Partly because of having had direct experience of working in Brussels (negotiating single market legislation in the first place). My worries centred entirely round the disproportionate power and lack of democratic accountability of the Commission (and I'm in good company in having those views - Martin Schultz, arch Euro federalist, has gone on record as saying either the Commission should be turned into a properly democratically elected part of the political structure, or its power should be severely curtailed so that it resembles much more closely the traditional role of a civil service - where I part company with him is not believing that reform is possible).

Is this important enough to have voted no? I personally thought so (and watching the Commission's attitude in negotiations since has not really changed my opinion). You can't have a massive political structure, edging its way towards federalism (which, in and of itself I don't have that much of a problem with), without all parts of the political decision making structure having political accountability.

I totally agree that economically all the arguments were on the side of remain (or rather, all bar one, which is the rather important question of the long-term stability of the Eurozone, which I think is a house of cards built on sand - former Greek finance minister Varafoukis' book Adults in the Room is an interesting read - incidentally, he is also staunchly commited to the European project and came over here to campaign for Remain).

By way of anecdote, I did have quite a funny conversation with a friend who is strongly Remain - she remarked that I was one of only two people she knew who'd voted leave (and were prepared to say so) - the other one worked for the European Medicines Agency. We were also the only two friends she had who had actually worked in Brussels and had close-up experience of how the system worked in practice.

What I don't think I (or any of the sane end of the leave vote could have forseen) was Cameron immediately jumping ship rather than ensuring a smooth handover (and also having instructed his civil servants deliberately to refrain from making any contingency plans in the event of a leave vote), Trump's election and rampant protectionism the other side of the Atlantic, and May being stupid enough to call an election and leave herself at the mercy of the DUP. And obviously I'm not happy with the chaotic negotiations which I think are going to end (as so many votes against Europe have - for example the Irish and the Lisbon Treaty) with the politicians ignoring the vote - I also think we're going to be royally shafted "pour encourager les autres".

Hairy How many people who voted Remain (or Leave for that matter) could say, without looking it up, how many EU institutions there are, what they are, and what the function of each is?

... and our survey said uh uh!