#even my most leftist friend was like ‘but the propaganda and they’re poor’ and even when i hit them with ‘most soldiers are middle class’

[lesbianpegbar]

kinda crazy that right as the us military talk on here blew up my friends brought it up and told me it was unfair of me to generalize and say that all soldiers and veterans are bad and that there’s so much tragedy to veterans. i could tell they were just getting pissed at me for pushing back like bro idk how to tell you i don’t care how bad their life is or how much propaganda was pumped into their brain you’re literally maintaining the us empire and killing black and brown people i don’t think this is “just the government.” fuck off with the sympathy for colonizers

[whattaloser]

Why I’m a Leftist

I know I’m probably just some dude who reblogs cool stuff to most of my followers but I’ve got a nice long story/rant about my political beliefs here that I’ve been wanting to write for awhile

I am a leftist first and foremost because I value human life. Everyone matters. No person is inherently more important than another person. Everyone has inherent rights that should not be infringed. People who infringe on other’s rights are morally wrong to do so. In essence my leftism is based on doing what is right. Obviously everyone has their own opinion on what is right but what is vitally important is knowing why your moral code is right. This is why so many people become liberals or conservatives or otherwise rather than leftists. They simply do not know enough about how the world works. There are a lot of reasons they don’t know, not the least of which is intentional covering up history and preventing education. I don’t believe people who aren’t leftists are stupid, but I do believe leftists know more. It’s kinda fucked up but it’s the only way you can explain inconsistencies in other’s values.

My path to leftism was full of cringe. When i was 7 years old Al Gore was running against George Bush for president. I did not know enough to have a real opinion on it but I am happy to say that I wanted Al Gore to win. This thought was based on very little if any logical reason. I basically flipped a coin in my head I think. Or maybe there was some outside influence that I wasn’t aware of, like my older sister who I looked up to might have said she liked Al gore. Either way, from then on I was in favor of democrats and did not like George Bush. When 9/11 happened I remembered thinking how dumb it was that people lined up around the block to get gas. Even as a child I knew that some buildings going down wasn’t going to end the great nation of the United States. In general I thought the United States was a great country. I knew from movies and tv as well as elementary school history that the United States was the most powerful country in the world. 

I recall in Sixth grade my teacher mentioned she liked George Bush because he was against gay marriage. Somehow at the time my opinion was the opposite despite being raised Catholic. I believed in god until I graduated high school and suddenly my desire to be religious slipped away and so did my belief. I do not consider this a great loss. 

Sometime in middle school or early high school I had solidified my opinion that the war in Iraq and Afghanistan was pointless and George Bush was a bad president. I was heavily influenced by movies and somewhat by video games that had imparted plenty of anti-war messages. Talks with my dad about nuclear missiles, watching History channel shows about world war 2, and playing Metal Gear Solid which had explicit nuclear disarmament messages, all informed me on the horrors of war. This was not enough to make me totally anti-military. In high school I wanted to join the military because I thought it was an easy way to get life experience and eventually pay for college. I was attracted to the Marines because of how cool movies like The Rock and video games like Call of Duty made it seem to be a Marine. I thought they were the best of the best. I was simultaneously against war, against veteran worship, and very pro-military. I was indoctrinated by years of government propaganda but also disillusioned by all forms of media including the book All Quiet on the Western Front which was about a soldier becoming disillusioned by witnessing horrors of war and the negative impact it had on everyone in his country. I spoke with a recruiter during my senior year and expressed my desire to be a Marine but I told him I wanted to wait a year after high school so I could get physically fit enough. The recruiter did not care that I was underweight and out of shape. He didn’t even care that I was very enthusiastic about joining, he was still putting on his best salesman demeanor which made me incredibly uneasy. The experience is supposed to pressure people into signing up on the spot, I think they even had forms for me to sign (i can’t really remember though) but I was not ready and was aware enough how I was being manipulated although not entirely cognizant. After that I no longer wanted to be in the military.

I also have to point out that I grew up in an unstable household. My parents were both loving but they were flawed and made mistakes and had problems. My dad was a typical Gen x man’s man. A little bit too emotionally repressed, but actually really good with kids when it came to play time and still is. He worked a lot because my mother couldn’t. My mother has been diagnosed with bipolar disorder as long as I can remember. Her medical bills related to her problems combined with other financially bad decisions by my parents caused my home life to be fraught. I lived in varying degrees of poverty until my parents separated and me and my siblings moved with my mother to her parents’ house away from my father. Prior to moving though, we endured great financial difficulty. We were unable to afford school lunches but could not apply for free or reduced lunches because technically my father made a lot of money, however it was all garnished for medical bills. My father always tells about how he bought a car that had hidden frame damage and when he attempted to sue the dealership for selling a bad car he lost and was garnished for that as well. Despite making over 25 dollars an hour in 1999, my father could not afford school lunches for three kids and couldn’t afford to pay the gas bill. Without going into too much more detail, life sucked and continued to suck until I graduated, at least financially. I still found plenty of joy and it wasn’t always that bad. We still found ways to have good things like video games and we could always rewatch old movies but there’s a lot of psychic weight that comes with being that poor as a child and I’m sure it affects me and my ability to empathize with others who in bad conditions. 

So i watched a lot of movies and documentaries, read a lot of books growing up, discovered internet forums at the age of 11, played video games, moved to a town that had a very large Hispanic population, and I even grew up poor. All of this life experience turned me into a very average liberal upon graduating high school. I was a very optimistic 18 year old. I thought science could save the world. If I was 18 today I would be an average redditor stereotype probably. The point here though is I still wasn’t a leftist. Only vaguely progressive and full of optimism. This is when I got sucked into the anti-feminist pipeline.

I can’t remember what exactly what I had going on in my life but I remember it was around the time of Gamergate. Everyone on the internet, celebrities, and pop culture were saying “if you believe in equality between genders you’re a feminist” an did not like that. And there was a ton of people online to tell me I was right in not liking that. They all said feminism was not necessary anymore because legally you couldn’t discriminate against women and I agreed. Gamergate made it worse for reasons too complicated to get into in this already long post but suffice it say I was “pro Gamergate.” This put me at odds with my closes friends who thought feminism was great and had no qualms with it, and were already embracing the idea of being a “social justice warrior.” Despite reading all kinds of anti-feminist think pieces and reveling in the discourse, I was still very progressive and liberal minded person. Still thought the military was bad, that black people were discriminated against etc. But so many aspects of anti-feminism were appealing to me as a white guy who tried their hardest to do what they’re told is right, had low self esteem, undiagnosed adhd and depression, and a fundamental misunderstanding of what feminism was. Two things got me out of anti-feminism though. The first and most important thing was having friends who were patient with me about it. I didn’t reveal how into anti-feminism I was because I was ashamed but they could sense it and pushed back when they could. The second thing that got me out of it was actually finding feminists online and reading what they had to say, staying away from poorly written clickbait articles that fueled misogynist tirades against feminism. After reading and learning from feminists it finally clicked. Our society is patriarchal and that affects how people interact with each other regardless of what is legal. Many of the complaints of anti-feminism talk about how men have it in society, so how can society be patriarchal. It’s because of patriarchy that men are put in bad positions. Some of the more self aware anti-feminists had retorts against these ideas but they were emotionally charged. There’s still some anti-feminists I have respect for because of how well prepared and logical they were when it came to disputing feminism. But when it came down to the fundamental tenants of feminsim all they could respond with was anger or outright denial of reality. (If you’re like I was and don’t understand how anyone can thing modern feminism is good please feel free to ask me more, I just can’t get into specifics in this long ass post) Anyways, once you understand patriarchy and how it affects an individuals actions then you can start seeing how other institutions and cultural norms can affect an individual. This is basically fundamentals of leftism. I’d say about 90% of my path to leftism was just naturally absorbing cultural and historical information through consumption of media. The most conservative people I know are people who haven’t read very many books or seen very many movies. I’m not saying watching Austin Powers at the age of 10 will make everyone a leftist but constantly recontextualizing the world by learning something new, even if you learned it from some dumb comedy movie, can give you better grounding in a shared reality.  Don’t know how to end this but I want to say when I was a teenager I thought “communism is good in theory but it doesn’t work in practice” and I had almost no historical basis for it other than the vague notion that USSR = bad despite having consumed a massive amount of media. None of it taught me what communism actually was, I didn’t know who Karl Marx was, and I had no clue why communism in the USSR failed. You can know a lot without knowing the truth so if you’re struggling with a loved one who is mind poisoned by conservative keep in mind that they know a lot but they’re missing something important to give clarity. 

This has been my Ted Talk

[zevlogofamiserable]

Meta #3 Postcolonial issues of a modern Les Mis AU

Hey first thing’s first, I’m a white person and don’t hesitate to call me out if I say shit, really. I mean it!

Second, let’s talk about Hugo’s racism.

Hugo’s racism

Because yes, the dude was a racist. Like many big names of his time, true. Like, to be honest, most of us today still (we inherited colonialism after all), true, but he’s not just any racist, he’s like one of the pillars of French culture, a supposed defender of freedom who was EXILED for his ideas (calm down people, look at his house in Guernesey… his exile was preeeeetty chill). Truth is… if he was so successful in his time, you can imagine he wasn’t the radicalest of the radicals (like surviving in the XIXth century in France as a public figure when you have political ideas you can’t compromise… mmh… gotta have VERY good connections). But he’s presented as THE hero of freedom in schools which is part of our Republican/actually pretty conservative and status quo propaganda and like, I’ll develop on that in a later meta about Alexane Ozier-Lafontaine but it creates a cognitive dissonance when you’re taught about that great man and then you discover his discourse about Africa. 

Erh. 

Hugo’s not so political

Now, many people here discovered Les Mis with the Musical and I love the fact that the book is called “The Brick” here because fuck it’s way too long and some parts are hella boring let’s be honest for two secs. Stop wanking on Napoleon, Totor!! Stop! 

But like, the Musical in itself is, although relatively faithful in its structure, heavily disconnected from the political subtext of The Brick which makes it way more digestible and universal. The Brick itself isn’t like, again, the radicalest of the radicals. It basically says: since Napoloeon nobody was so cool/rad in the government. Society treat poor people like shit, they’re human too (except the Patron Minette anime villains, those are eeeeeevil). Even in its time, the Goncourts brothers (and they weren’t like the radicalest of the radicals themselves) were like: “Hugo’s making shit tons of money by talking about the poor, isn’t he?” And he was criticized for his lack of observation, realism, body… like, when you compare the Brick to other contemporary texts (even just Balzac) he’s pretty… symbolic in his approach. I’m no literary critic anyway. Point is…

What do we do with that shit in our alternate universe fanfictions?

So there’s a fandom around les Mis… mostly composed of non French people not so familiar with French problematic/colonial history, and they enjoy and have fun with all this and it’s great. You can be in fandoms formed around problematic stuff without being a Nazi (I mean, I’m still kindah in the Shingeki No Kyojin Fandom and we all know its author is… problematic to say the least ><). 

And there’s all the alternate universe in contemporary contexts trend around Les Mis and of course, we supposedly live in a postcolonial society so you racebend characters and it makes sense. You wanna update l’ABC to have them talk about contemporary political issues and postcolonial issues are a huge deal and I bet there are also many POC in the fandom who just want to appropriate this material and make it their own and I think it makes a lot of sense. 

But… 

I started writing this webseries with that in mind: let’s talk about modern day young leftist people politics in France and let’s racebend some characters and collaborate with the friends who’ll portray them to talk about postcolonialism in France. I had… erh good intentions I guess. 

However… a friend pointed out to me that it was out of the question for her to play a character initially written by a racist author such as Hugo as a black person talking about postcolonial issues and I also think it makes a lot of sense and I must thank her again for the discussion we had then. 

So… I found a compromise in a way. I think it would be really weird to evacuate postcolonial discussions from modern leftist discourses. It’s everywhere even though… some leftist really try to evacuate it (which will also happen in ZeVlog because I have little imagination and when I see stuff, I just project it in my writing). But… I decided to include characters from other novels written by authors who came from old French colonies (and happen to share the nationality of the people who portray them in two cases) to discuss these postcolonial issues (and not give them to Hugo’s characters)… and that’s why my Lesgle doesn’t live with Joly (it was supposed to be Joly at first because Aaliyah Xpress is a real life doctor) but with Bê, a character created by Dương Thu Hương, a Vietnamese dissident.

Bê and Lesgle’s first apparition

Bê comes from the book, Journey in Childhood (not sure if it’s available in English alas). I’ve read other books by this author to prepare this webseries and all of them have a real political weight and evoke the French colonization, but I chose this one because I really liked the main character who resists an abusive authority. I hesitated because it’s a child character and I read Asian people tend to be infantilized (?) but despite the “Childhood” in the title, Bê is a really mature and pragmatic character and I really recommend this book! Also, apparently, Bê is also the main character in Story of an Actress but the book is not translated. Well. Read some Dương Thu Hương tho, you can find some in English and she’s good!

Anyway, I’ll tell you more about the two other books I picked for this weird crossover in future metas.

Till then, tell me what you think of all this questioning. I’d like to hear your opinions. I think the issue is very complex and I didn’t even outline it properly here!

[politicsiscomplicated]

Instead of Punching Nazis, Steal Their Target Audience From Them

If America today is analogous to Nazi Germany, the people I'm arguing against act like we're in 1938, with annexations of our neighbors and Kristallnacht looming near.  We're not.  We're not even in 1933 at the beginning of the dictatorship yet.  We're still somewhere in the 20s.  The Nazis are clearly, obviously evil, going around attacking people and screaming about how the Jews/liberals/non-whites/foreigners/etc. are ruining the country, and even have some friends in high places.  But most of the country still isn't willing to vote for them.  We the enemies of Naziism, all of us from ultra-conservatives like Orrin Hatch all the way to leftists and progressives like many of you my friends are, aren't in the place of some underground resistance movement fighting a guerrilla campaign against the omnipresent Nazi menace.  We are right now all in the place of the other political parties that fucking failed to fix Germany by peaceful means after WW1.  And there are a lot of disgruntled but politically detached people out there who aren't Nazis but might be persuaded to vote for Nazis if we don't get to them first with better ideas.

We saw this last year when millions of disgruntled former Obama voters and millions of voters who said they normally don't vote at all came out to support a notoriously incompetent asshole who stumbled into being the first major presidential candidate since Wilson to receive the endorsement of the Klan and not disavow it.  Never forget that Hitler didn't gain power through coercion like Mussolini or revolution like Franco.  He was the leader of a major political party, elected partially because of terrorism, but also largely because his party was able to convince the public that they could solve their problems.  The Nazis and their ideological cousins in the alt-right are competing with us now to win over the people who are, frankly, ignorant of or disinterested in politics and therefore vulnerable to Nazis winning them over by presenting their mix of paranoia and outright lies nicely.

The people we are competing with them over, or ought to be, are the people I've heard ranting my entire life — and I know, any of you New Englanders, that you have heard them too, and are probably related to some of them — about "reverse racism" and "handouts", and how the Clintons are secret murderers, and so on blah blah blah.  They're wrong, and they don't understand what we're talking about.  But that's not how we respond to them.  Instead, we respond to them by writing them off as unfixably hateful and accuse them of lying rather than not understanding.  We push them away into the waiting hands of Nazi propagandists.  Nazis, like the toxic right-wing talkshow media, respond to them by egging them on to embrace and use their anger, Emperor Palpatine-style.  Any chance we give the Nazis to portray themselves as the victim of leftist aggression is another voter who, when it is time for our equivalent of the 1932 elections, will go to the polls and support the Nazis even though they may not personally be a Nazi.

But the propaganda is out there, and the rallies are happening, and they have an audience.  Clearly something must be done.  So what is to be done about the Nazis themselves?  How can we possibly avoid seeming to engaging them as equals, which would give them the same false balance legitimacy currently enjoyed by creationists and anti-vaxers and climate change deniers?  Not through preemptive violence.  We should certainly be willing to fight in self-defense, or in the defense of another we can help, but remember, there is already a narrative out there of "violent leftists" who need "law and order" brought down upon them.  The president himself buys into and spreads this.  We need to make him look ridiculous.

When the NAACP took up the case of Rosa Parks, rather than any of the other people who defied bus segregation before her, it was because they and Parks understood how easily-swayed people are by victim-blaming.  When a bad thing happens to someone, it seems to be a baked-in human instinct to examine the victim to see why they "provoked" something bad, rather than examining what's wrong with the offender to make them think victimizing someone could possibly be okay.  They sought out a person about whom the fewest negative things could be said.  This is an effective tactic.  It anticipates and shuts down the stupid but popular arguments people are drawn to.  By showcasing the most clear-cut, inarguable cases of injustice, that bulk of disengaged public sees that a system they were previously indifferent to ought to be actively changed or destroyed.  By fighting only defensively, I believe we can preempt any attempt by the Nazis to use that tactic on us.  Make it clear that the victim of an act of racist or other bigoted violence did nothing to provoke it, and you turn the public's outrage on the offender, and maybe even on the ideology that encouraged the violence.

It is also worth remembering at this point that, as Jon Stewart put it, the bias of the mainstream media is towards sensationalism, conflict, and laziness.  They want someone to get pundits enraged at because enraged pundits get them viewers or listeners or readers, and viewers or listeners or readers get them ad revenue.  Let someone make a heinous speech and the news cycle will be about what a fucking piece of shit that person is.  Punch someone making a heinous speech, and the news cycle will be fake-balance arguments about how there's "anger on both sides".

So what about "fighting" metaphorically, by disrupting the lives of Nazis (or Nazi-allies)?  Public shame will do something, right?  Well, maybe, if you get the right person.  A friend did a back-of-the-envelope-type estimate using some demographic data about this.  If we assume for the sake of argument that every alt-rightist is a white American man, distributed randomly among all white American men in general appearance, and we have pictures of every single alt-rightist based on estimates of how many of them there are, and we only make mistakes 1% of the time in matching the alt-rightists' faces to the faces of all white American men, the number of innocent people we falsely identified as alt-rightists would be over 24 times the number of correctly-identified alt-rightists.  Indeed, we've already seen some false identifications based on pictures of people from the "Unite the Right" rally.  (And just a few years ago, internet vigilantes also came to confidently wrong conclusions about the identities of the Boston Marathon bombers in exactly the same way, by poring over mediocre-to-poor-quality photos of the event, although thankfully police realized quickly these were incorrect.)

And even if you do get the right person, are you sure you want to actively encourage managers to fire people for their activities outside of work?  Remember those people I mentioned earlier who are outraged about "reverse racism" and so on?  Some of those people are managers.  Some managers will fire Nazis because, quite accurately, they understand that Nazis are bad.  But other managers will, based on the same encouragement, fire Black Lives Matter protestors.  It's not hard to find examples of political commentators or even politicians calling BLM black supremacists or even terrorists.  Because you know what?  People don't make rational decisions based on what is actually true.  Ever.  About anything.  They make vaguely-approaching-rational decisions based on what feels true.

You may trust yourself, or a really good boss you have, to make this sort of decision.  I may even agree with those judgements.  But recall the worst boss you've had, or the worst boss someone you know has had.  Someone obnoxious, petty, ignorant, mean, or clearly looking for an excuse, any excuse, to fire someone.  Now imagine how they'd react if you said "you should fire people for being hateful outside of work".  They might fire a Nazi, but I'd place my bet on them firing a BLM supporter, or someone with a different religion than them (because, of course, disagreeing with someone's religion is blasphemy, and blasphemy is hate speech!), or someone who is very much not a Nazi but the manager falsely thinks they are because they just read a wrongheaded book or blog post that argues that some group of people actual Nazis hate, like gay people, or completely mainstream moderates, are the "real" Nazis.

If you really feel compelled to take matters into your own hands, proceed with the extremest of extreme caution, understand your own ignorance and failures and biases, admit to and suffer the consequences of your mistakes if you harm the innocent, and absolutely do not fire unless fired upon.

The last several days of arguments I've seen, and occasionally participated in, online have just gotten nasty and frustrating.  So this post is all I intend to say on the topic.  I am sick of being misconstrued by people I would otherwise firmly agree with.  I would just like to remind them that I understand exactly what is on the line if the Nazis actually win; just off the top of my head, there are at least three, maybe seven if you really reach, reasons I will be sent to a concentration camp if America truly follows the trajectory of Nazi Germany.  That's why I am so emphatic that we must head off the Nazis.  We must stop them from using the media to their favor, and we must win over their target audience of people who are vaguely upset and frustrated but do not know at whom their frustration should be directed.  We must reach out to the angry but not very politically engaged public and do a decent job of explaining ourselves to them and debunking Nazi paranoia and lies before the Nazis have the chance to suck them in first.