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  • I've said it before, and I'll say it again:

    Those of us on the left needs to be more concerned with our optics and police ourselves better.

    Catch-phrases like "all cops are bastards", "defund the police", "math is racist", "black lives matter", "trans-women are women" etc., do not help to promote liberal progressive ideologies and push the people on the fence away.

    For the record, I'm not saying that the ideas behind the words are bad*, but the phrases themselves act as a litmus test; If anyone questions the phrases, the divide has occurred, and they're a fascist (another word which is used far too often).

    Many of these are so easy to correct for, "Reform the Police", "Black Lives Matter Too" are the most obvious and easy changes.

    There are those who'll say that conservatives are going to complain about it anyway, and many of them are set in stone, but there are far too many people going to the right, as a result of the left making fools of ourselves.

    The strength of the right is that they'll accept anyone who isn't left. Proud Boys, Neo-Nazi's, and KKK are tolerated by the right because their strength is in numbers, not ideas.

    *I support the ideas behind all of them, but how they are perceived by conservatives is not how they were intended to be understood.

    EDIT: The conversations about liberal and liberalism have been draining. There is one definition which is practically synonymous with progressivism - this is what I meant, not Liberalism.

    • Not a single person on the left has ever said math is raciat. That was something Tucker Carlson wholesale made up after we started asking why black kids did worse in school. As for "black lives matter" I'd say that's pretty self-evident, and the only possible rebuttal ("don't white lives matter too?") has a one sentence counter ("obviously. but white lives aren't under threat right now.")

      More to the point, respectability politics in general is a trap. We could have better slogans, that's true, especially in the "getting people on our side" phase, but compromising what we believe in to be more palatable to moderates, even in the slightest, is unacceptable. "Sure, I'm cool with trans people (maybe I'm even trans myself), but neopronouns are where I draw the line" is their in. Once conservatives see that we admit some point is too far to our side, once they see the bubble of people we protect can shrink, they won't stop until it's shrunk all the way.

      • I wouldn't go so far as calling those people leftists (same as tankies aren't leftists) but "math is racist" is definitely a thing that happens. People were suing in Canada that the tests to become accredited as teacher includes maths tests, and because some statistic somewhere showed that black folks score statistically lower on maths, they claimed that the requirement to pass it is racist. That completely ignored that they could re-take the test as often as they pleased and that plenty of education was given to prospective teachers that enabled them to pass those tests. A lower court agreed with the claim of racial discrimination, the constitutional court then struck it down pretty much saying "lulwut" in legalese.

        No, maths is not racist. The people claiming it is racist were the racists here, thinking that being black makes you somehow inherently incapable of passing those tests, so much that you can't even pass them with studying. Also I bet the disparity in maths scores by skin colour vanishes if you control for socio-economic status but the complainants would've needed maths to understand that so they didn't.

        OTOH, optically those kinds of fucks are associated with leftism and I'd say it's important to openly respond to that kind of silliness with "lulwut" before the courts get around to doing it.

        As to black lives matter: I think it was a strategic mistake to oppose "all lives matter". The slogan, that is, not the racist fucks. Instead, it should've immediately been appropriated by the movement precisely to define it and to leave no doubt in anyone's mind that you don't mean "non-black lives don't matter", which is understandably a reading lots of people had because they're projecting their own racism, or just racist realism.

        “Sure, I’m cool with trans people (maybe I’m even trans myself), but neopronouns are where I draw the line”

        Neopronouns are an enby thing, not trans and yes I'm completely fine with calling you they/them and have no issues with your ingroup using as many different pronouns as there are members, but I'm not going to fucking remember all of them. I very much draw a hard, red, line at "difficult on purpose" as that would validate people's vulnerable narcissism, "prove that you don't hate me by jumping over random hoops I come up with". Leftism is not the defence of maladaptive personality traits.

      • I stand corrected, though it says a lot that I believed that there would be a group from the left making that claim.

    • Liberal != leftist. Also, the right wing could not care less about optics, because they are the ones who dictate what is acceptable. Why would we play by their rules, especially since they always change them?

      • Oops, my bad, I forgot liberal means something different in America. I meant it as a synonym for left.

        Why would we play by their rules when they always change them?

        Common misunderstanding is we're playing the same game. The game they're playing is "own the lib-tards". At the moment, we are scoring own-goals and it's fucking embarrassing.

        And as aforementioned, it's the own-goals which are causing people to switch sides.

        The game the left is playing is "who has the best idea", which doesn't matter to the right, because they're either deliberately taking us out of context, or believing on face value what is being said by those who are consciously misunderstanding.

        The only way to win both games is to stop giving them ammo and present our ideas with a modicum of sanity.

    • The left gets massacred for prosaic slogans like "Black lives matter" and "Trans rights are human rights" while the right straight up chants "Jews will not replace us" and nobody bats an eye. So I don't think the left's tone is the problem here.

      And yes, for the record, black lives matter and trans women (note, no hyphen) are women.

      • The Left are the adults in the room. We need to speak clearly so the children do not think we are taking them to the dentist (we totally are but there's no need to trigger them).

        The Right cannot change, it's in their nature. It's practically pointless to try. The best we can do is be tactical, and avoid scaring them.

    • .Those of us on the left needs to be more concerned with our optics and police ourselves better.

      I think we already police each other far too much. We need to police the right better.

      What puts you on the left, by the way?

      Catch-phrases like "all cops are bastards", "defund the police", "math is racist", "black lives matter", "trans-women are women" etc., do not help to promote liberal progressive ideologies and push the people on the fence away

      They're meant to get a reaction and spark conversation.

      Many of these are so easy to correct for, "Reform the Police", "Black Lives Matter Too" are the most obvious and easy changes.

      "Reform" and "defund" are not the same things. People tried "reform the police". That didn't work. It isn't a good rallying cry.

      Defunding the police also makes more sense when you realize that the police are over-funded in the first place.

      *I support the ideas behind all of them, but how they are perceived by conservatives is not how they were intended to be understood.

      What do you think that the ideas behind them are? Because I have a feeling that you don't understand the meanings behind some of these slogans.

      There's a lot to unpack behind something like "trans women are women", but that's supposed to be the start of the conversation, not the end.

      • I don't know how much the left can police the right, if at all.

        I don't think the left need to police ourselves more, I think we need to police less, but with more patience, respect and insight (better).

        I see the left eating its own all the time. A lot of it is the No True Leftist fallacy. Let's say you're a gay vegan communist hippie who just so happens to think trans women shouldn't use the womens bathroom, then you're not reasoned with, you're immediately a bigot. This is the wrong kind of policing and causes people to seek validation from people who think the same.

        I'm leftist for sure, communism is the end-goal. I'm vegan, I hate animal exploitation and suffering. We need to save the planet and ourselves. Discrimination sucks. Rehabilitation is more important than punishment. I'm atheist, religion is harmful. What am I missing?

        The phrases are meant to get a reaction and spark a conversation sure. That happens on the left, but the right take it at face value and run with it.

        The meanings behind the slogans.

        "All cops are bastards" systemic issues inherently make the duty of the police, not a community hero, but a revenue generating, fear mongering enforcer of dumb laws.

        There are good police officers though who do want to help. That's why I don't like it.

        "Black Lives Matter" yeah, they do. End of story.

        "Trans women are women" the word woman used to exclusively mean "female at birth". Now it means "those who identify as a woman". Therefore, identifying as a woman makes you a woman.

        How'd I do doc? Did I pass? Or am I literally Hitler?

      • 『rant』

        Abolish the police.

        It's time to take a good hard look at how we approach wrongdoing and injustice, as very little of what happens falls into the realm of petty crime (a category that includes premeditated homicide).

        Our current system focuses on detecting and seizing solvent assets and filling prison cells with warm bodies. It has a not-insignificant body count of its own, and completely ignores the elite deviance that costs society more lives, more suffering, more cost and more destruction than petty crime by orders of magnitude. (Such as the opioid crisis, PFOA throughout our water supplies and preventable industrial greenhouse emissions.)

        『/rant』

      • You missed the point entirely.

      • The only point I agree on is that "defund the police" is a dumb slogan. "Defund" means "remove all funding," which is not the solution.

    • Conservatives would not change their minds. They listen to whatever their talking heads tell them, and they would turn that around and make a counter protest. That's all conservativism is.

      There are no "sensible" right-wingers, they've had their values thoroughly corrupted by a media-machine designed to split the worming class against itself. Changing optics would do nothing, so instead the left should focus on continuing grassroots efforts.

      Also, liberals are not leftists, liberalism is pro-capitalism.

      • I'm feeling like you're deliberately misunderstanding me.

        The people I'm appealing to are centrists. The last thing we need are more votes for Trump. It was too close last time, and it'll be too close this time too.

    • You actually kind of have liberalism wrong as well though. It's the idea that individual liberty creates political agency. From that we get the ideas around inclusive society being critical to a functioning democracy, because democratic participation is the intersection of inclusion, liberty and individual actualization.

      Or rather, people must first be free to engage with political questions out in the open (liberty). Then they must feel like they have a stake in society (inclusion). Then they must have the time and resources to participate (actualization). This is the foundation of liberal democracy.

      What you are describing is commonly considered a form of liberalism, but is more aptly described as progressive liberalism. You are definitely correct though, that many forms of leftism and liberalism are compatible, despite people on Lemmy insisting otherwise.

      • I've also heard what I'm describing as liberal as "classic liberal".

        It's not worth getting into tbh. I've been down this road so many times today, if you really want to engage in paragraphs of texts debating semantics you are welcome to check out all the parallel replies lol.

        Appreciate your response though.

    • "Black Lives Matter Too"

      Only someone operating in bad faith would claim this isn't what "Black Lives Matter" means.

      • That's the entire Right. You cannot win them on the grounds of good-faith, truthfulness, or humanity because their politics is solely about power. Conservative politics are the politics of abusers—litterally everything they wish to "conserve" within society includimg "tradition" is their freedom and ability to abuse. That's it:

        Family values is not about creating healthy families, it is about patriarchy and the right of the parents to abuse their children.

        Defending the sanctity of marriage is about defining LGBTQ people out of legal rights and entitlements.

        School choice is about controlling what ideas not just their children are exposed to but their neighbors as well.

        Etc. Etc.

        Every conservative position is a bad faith push to further their ability to control the lives others and their ideas deserve neither respect nor a platform.

    • Please tell me, as a trans nonbinary person, what the respectable version of "trans women are women" is?

      • Living your own life for yourself and not getting bent out of shape because strangers on the Internet aren't interested in changing their cultures and traditions to adapt to whatever you demand of them.

      • You don't have to say anything like it, no replacement needed.

        The phrases like "black lives matter" and "trans women are women" imply their opposite. That is, the only reason they are being said is because they aren't true. They are said in an attempt to make them true.

        When people hold a sign saying black lives matter they aren't celebrating the great respect that is given to black people. They are protesting that black lives do not in fact matter to some people. They are trying to make it so that black lives matter.

        I think the downside of this approach is that it creates a kind of backlash when you make a kind of generalization about a lot of people saying they care less about black lives than other lives. Whether it is true or not, they will feel falsely accused and become defensive, dig in, and look for reasons why they are actually fine.

        Similarly with proclaiming that "trans women are women". It points the finger at anyone who disagrees, saying they are wrong about women. Maybe they grew up with an idea of what the word women means. Now you are telling them they have been using the word incorrectly for a long time, maybe decades. You might even accuse them of transphobia or bigotry based on a disagreement over semantics. If they feel this is unfair they will not be won over to your cause.

        You might say indignantly "what how can you say the it is not true that trans women are women?". Well, let's think for a minute about what it takes for that statement to be true. For that statement to be true, it would have to be the case that most of the time you see, hear, or read the word "women" it refers to cis and trans women using the recent idea of self-identification of gender rather than the prior one.

        If we had reached that point, then the statement would be true, but also it would be totally uninteresting to make the statement. It would be like saying "women are also human" or something (hopefully) uncontroversial.

        As for how to get there, I'm not sure.

        Maybe more inclusive language like "get to know a trans person before you judge" would push people to take a step that is known to reduce transphobia. Or "treat trans women with dignity" as a way to evoke a person's gentler nature? Or "if she looks like a woman and talks like a woman, don't be rude, treat her like a woman"? Kind of random ideas there, though.

        I don't know the right answer, but the nasty rhetoric and accusations people glibly throw around online to degrade and vilify people who aren't happily jumping on board the trans movement train...I personally think it's divisive and unproductive. It's going to lose potential allies rather than recruit them.

      • I don't really know honestly. I'm sure someone can come up with something clever which gets to the intent behind the meaning without entrenching bigots.

    • The strength of the right is that they'll accept anyone who isn't left.

      Here the far right is constantly bickering and their political parties are steadily fissioning. There's pro Putin and anti Putin far right, vax and antivax far right, ethnonationalistic and moderate far right... sometimes it just isn't possible to agree what you hate.

      • It's definitely a weird time to be a republican lol.

        However, I haven't seen much denouncement of the crazies, if at all.

  • Meanings of words and the way they are used change over time especially when their is an active movement to change the meaning to harm others. I have no idea if woke could be taken back by left for its original purpose or if it's too far gone but OOP is not wrong. That is how the word is used now most of the time. This doesn't make its original definition irrelevant but it does make it difficult to use around the general public. You can't simply ignore a co-opt

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