I don't get it

Observing the gender-critical sphere’s constant condemnation of “leftists,” it finally occurred to me to wonder, out loud on my Facebook, why people who spend so much time condemning leftists nevertheless choose to associate with me when I’ve said over and over that I’m a leftist.

A person I spend time with IN person responded in the comments and said something about how people should be willing to give one another the benefit of the doubt regardless of what those people believe.

The weird thing is, he appears to me to be mostly leftist. Possibly all the way there. No one is pure any politics, but he’s in the ballpark. He’s a busy man and we’ll probably never have that conversation but I bet if we went down the list of typical political issues that Americans bother to form an opinion about, we’d find we’re besties for at least seventy-five percent of it. I think we disagree on the death penalty so far*. I have been Facebook friends with him for far longer than I’ve known him in person and seen him talk political stuff for more than a decade, so I feel like I’d have seen any other major disagreement long before now. I think that if we clash anywhere else it is likely over the Israel-Palestine war. And not long ago, that wasn’t true. (I have my own theories about what happened there, but they aren’t important here. Or anywhere, really. Maybe two hundred people at this point care what I think. Maybe three hundred. Out of an eight-billion worldwide population. And then only sometimes. I am completely inconsequential.)

And yet because I use a word to describe myself, he seems to think we have to be at political odds, even if we’re currently being polite about it. I suspect a lot of people I’m associated with, online or off, feel that way — over the word. Not so much the positions. We never really even have conversations to work out what those positions are or where we actually differ, when we do. In the current rhetorical environment, I’m not sure we could. People barely want to chat with me for fun anymore as it is. I am in the way of knowing that in at least some cases it is because they are very busy, lots of stuff going on. How they therefore believe they have time to be political at all is beyond me (except for the one guy who is political for a living, paycheck and everything), but I guess old habits die hard.

Still.

When I say I am a leftist I am not saying I am a Democrat (they fucking wish; never gonna happen again until at minimum they stop defending gender identity) or that I have specific beliefs about things. At one time I might have said that. Following Dr. Jane Clare Jones on Twitter changed my outlook. She has pointed out repeatedly that leftism is political materialism — politics based on what’s happening in actual, physical reality — and if you look at the history of leftist theory and leftist activism, you soon see she has a point. Even Karl Marx knew what a woman is; how anyone can call gender self-ID “Marxist” completely escapes me. I can only conclude they WANT everyone pissed off at Marxists. Huh. What an original political position. Never seen that before.

🙄

Anyway, in the United States the actual political spectrum goes something like this:

I didn’t make this meme. I found this meme back when I still lived with my daughter’s father in Ohio, so I have had it for at least four years. I happen to know I saw it well before the pandemic, so let’s say I’ve had it for probably ten years. The meme-maker was calling Bernie Sanders a centrist between five and ten years ago.

Lo and behold, Bernie recently proved them right by hosting a troon-fronted rock band singing sexualized lyrics that really were not appropriate for a political rally. A bit of digging on his official website also brings us this abomination. He claims elsewhere on his site to be in favor of women’s rights and completely ignores that pretending gender identity is real absolutely destroys women’s rights.

Gender identity is woowoo bullshit. A thought construct. Woowoo-bullshit thought constructs are not leftist. You can’t see them. You can’t measure them. If every single one of us forgot about gender identity tomorrow, including the people addicted to the concept and evangelizing it, we’d all be just fucking fine — same as if we forgot about the Tooth Fairy.

Bernie may be leftist on some other positions — it looks like he probably is; I would characterize his general support of Medicare For All as being based in leftist sensibilities — but he’s not leftist enough.

I’ve seen other people, including the aforementioned friend who works in politics, respond to my assertion of leftism being political materialism by explaining where the term “leftist” came from in the first place; if I recall correctly, it has something to do with the seating chart in the French national parliament and which people held which political positions on which side of the aisle. If I’m remembering that right. Well, if we’re gonna go there, then nobody outside of France is a leftist. Why are we even still using this label for anyone? I mean, if this means we need to drop “left” and “right” entirely and instead opt for “materialist” and “religious wacko,” I’m down. Let me know.

Meanwhile, all this insistence on reverting back to religious arguments as to who holds which politics because it feels good to apply labels incorrectly is not helping the national (international?) conversation at all. If you know someone isn’t a leftist, quit calling them a leftist. If you know a political position isn’t leftist, don’t blame leftism for it existing.

Even the current tactic in some circles of distinguishing between “old-growth leftists” — some people’s term for real leftists — and whatever the “other leftists” are supposed to be is not really helping anything, because those “other leftists” are pushing woowoo-bullshit thought constructs on the general public and causing a lot of material harm. All you’re gonna get in the end is an ignorant, uneducated public thinking leftists caused all this shit.

Which is going to mean they come after me.

And while I’m confused as to why some of you continue associating with me, I’m even more confused why some of you want me dead. Because that’s what’s going to happen if this continues and enough people in my geographical vicinity get angry enough fast enough. Because I’m not gonna start calling myself a right-winger just to throw them off the scent. We’ve got too many fucking liars in politics already, and that ain’t been working out so great.

So quit egging ‘em on, hey? Use your words correctly. Thanks.

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[*My position on the death penalty: We don’t trust the government to regulate drugs or to spend our tax dollars wisely or to help other countries but we’re going to trust them to decide whom to kill? Uh-huh. Look. If you try to rape someone or murder someone and they kill you first, then play stupid games, win stupid prizes and your victim should never see a day of prison time. But as soon as you introduce bureaucracy into deciding whether someone deserves to die, you introduce more and more opportunity for error with each layer of bureaucracy you build and if you fuck up, you can’t bring that person back to life. I have seen state governments screw up too many times over this. I’m sure the feds have screwed up similarly. Considering that if we didn’t have an extensive appeal system we’d have likely offed even more innocent people (of that specific crime: I’ve seen people go “well, he was always a troublemaker” when literally there’s no record of prior homicides or even attempts at such — what the fuck?), therefore it will always be more expensive to hold someone on death row, even in a fiscal sense we’d be better off commuting everyone under a death sentence to life without parole.

Friend’s stance is more visceral: he despises people who rape and murder and especially people who both rape and murder in the same crime, and desires to see them removed from existence. Completely understandable. And if we could guarantee to arrest and convict the right person every single time, I’d agree with him (about the desired outcome; I also despise rapists and rapist-murderers. Other kinds of murderers, well, it depends). Unfortunately, that’s not the case. So we disagree less from being on “opposite ends of the political spectrum” than because we have different considerations in play for our respective stances.]