This is great and has pinpoint accuracy, especially about the way people treat it as their weary duty to instruct us that whatever elected official we have just mentioned is Bad Actually. Thanks, Ian, I’ll be sure to look into this Iraq War thing you’ve brought to my attention
I mean fuck:
Left-Wing Vote Suppression
One manifestation of this indiscriminate biliousness is the statement that gets aired every four years: that in presidential elections we are asked to choose the lesser of two evils. Now, this is not an analysis or an insight; it is a cliché
this essay is so on-the-nose it’s depressing
“Liberals often concentrate on domestic policy, where education, health care, and economic justice matter more and where Democrats are sometimes decent, even lifesaving, while radicals are often obsessed with foreign policy to the exclusion of all else.”
it is incredibly depressing that generation after generation stubbornly refuses to learn from the last. I wish I could go back in time and show this to my 18-year-old self before pulling the lever for Nader thinking it would send a message and push the party to the left
It's incredible how many people continue to deny that Gore would have won if not for Nader, given that the margin in Florida was ~500 votes.
Nader negated his entire career as an environmentalist by preventing an environmentalist from beating an oil tycoon.
You know who else is "obsessed with US foreign policy to the exclusion of all else"?
People who don't live in the USA, can't vote in your elections, but who are nevertheless affected by you.
There are several dozen of them, at least. And while they may be only 50% human, they do still count.
And I guarantee that outside of the US, most people prefer Biden to Trump. In fact, there seems to be puzzlement about how this election is even happening.
Not that this isn't bollocks in its own right anyway, but it also would be more convincing had the US not been busy supporting actual genocide right now.
"Forget about American imperialism and genocides conducted on the back of US arms sales, these are hardly REAL lefty concerns" is the most bonkers nationalist nonsense, tbh.
Everything is not perfect, therefore this piece criticizing Leftists for their self-defeating habit of being relentlessly, off-puttingly bitter & negative because the world is not perfect, is bollocks
hotDAMN, say this louder for the folks in the back! (And by 'folks in the back,' I mean the Kamala-is-a-cop eternal defeatists who will be beating this same drum if and when she's running for president again.)
Wish i had read it then. Sums up the essential problem of the “Left” since it emerged in 1791 in Paris: the apparently irresistible urge to disagree within its big tent with such constant vehemence it can never stay together long enough to build a house. The greatest conservative asset: the Left.
Authoritarian liberals can't stand it when their policies and arguments go bust and they're called on it.
It's hilarious, but not like failing at M4A, student loan abolition, legal cannabis, and codified Roe, then expecting rampant amnesia and lots of votes, in that order.
Fuck Biden and fuck you.
Damn, the Tom Dispatch, that’s a name I haven’t heard in a long time. My entry point to the political blogosphere c. 2003. Probably came across it looking for news on the Howard Dean campaign
i feel you. and i more or less act accordi ng to this, but humanity is at a crossroads, “transform or die,” and everything needs to do one or the other. balanced, nuanced attitudes might not be up to the task…
the world has gotten so much better in so many ways thanks to progressives and liberals and radicals of various stripes, and instead of celebrating that or considering better futures it's pissing and sniping
Pissing, sniping, and threats (and sometimes even action) to undercut all the progress we've fought for with blood, sweat, and tears because there is still evil in the world and the good guys don't always win.
"If (X left-wing or liberal politician) is so good, then why are people still suffering?" is a complaint so common on this site that three posts sprang to your mind fully-formed while reading this.
I’ve tangled with people like that here, and on Twitter and Reddit. When I push back on their puritanical leftist doomerism I’m accused of “punching left” and called Blue MAGA. Just remember this:
Oh Lord, the blue MAGA thing…listen, I’m sorry I explained how the Federal Reserve works, but no amount of you being mad is going to change the fact that Biden does not dictate what it does.
Excuse me but marijuana isn't 100% free to use nationwide and we don't have single payer and all the student loans haven't been forgiven 100% and Israel exists so fuck Joe Biden. I am obviously a very smart and principled voter who has thought about these things a lot, and let me tell you
Nonsense, if we elect a sufficiently spunky revolutionary president he can tell them to go fuck themselves and do what he wants in defiance of the rest of the government.
/s, pls don't think I'm serious
I was called Blue MAGA in spite of the fact I hate Joe Biden with a passion and went him dead and think the liberal moderate is scum, so absolutely Blue MAGA became an insult used by nihilistic doomerist leftists... Blue MAGA is real but I sure as hell ain't the Blue MAGA.
There's the Online Left, who have never done one bit of planning or work on progress in their life, so they are extremely puritanical. And then there's the Practical Left, who have done work and understand progress comes slowly, and compromise is often necessary.
This feels like a waaaay more insufferable version of people never writing a novel or screenplay because it's already satisfying enough to tell people what the story would be like
They want power, but they don't want to compromise to get it. They know they are correct, and they believe, very strongly, that it is unjust and wrong that they are not simply made king by virtue of being right when everybody else is wrong.
I will never forget going to a rally right after Trump's first travel ban where a refugee who came to the US as a child spoke about his experiences. When he was done, a leftist activist stood up in the Q&A and began berating him for working at a bank with oil investments.
I hung out with leftist anarchists when I was in my 20s and quickly realized even though I share many of the same basic ideals, I wasn't cut out for the scene because I wasn't obsessed with ruining everything enjoyable by pointing out all the ways it wasn't good enough.
