#far left radicals

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Michael Deacon

Published: Apr 3, 2024

For young people today, finding a partner of the opposite sex must be dreadfully hard. But this isn’t because of the pressure to look like an Instagram gym buff, or the horrors of dating apps, or the fact that no one under the age of 30 seems to drink alcohol any more.

It’s because these days, young men and women have got absolutely nothing in common.

Seriously. All of a sudden, they appear to have developed completely different values. It’s unprecedented. In the past, the two sexes tended to hold roughly similar views on politics. But research compiled over the past five years shows that in Britain – and indeed other Western countries – young women have become more progressive, while young men have become more conservative. And the resulting ideological gap is now staggeringly vast. 

Alice Evans, an academic at King’s College London, is writing a book on this phenomenon, entitled The Great Gender Divergence. She says it’s been caused by a variety of factors, including “social media bubbles” and “economic resentment”. Whatever the reasons for it, though, I think there is a vital point we’re in danger of missing. Which is that only one of the two sexes is strictly responsible.

Recently, the Financial Times published some charts illustrating how the gulf between young men and women has grown in each Western country. And in every chart, there is an unmistakable pattern. The political views of young men haven’t actually altered all that much. Their drift to the Right has been really quite gentle.

The political views of young women, however, have changed dramatically. Their move to the Left has been abrupt and profound. In truth, then, this cavernous ideological divide is almost entirely attributable to them.

Which is curious. Because, whenever the divide is discussed by politicians and commentators, they make it sound as if the problem is young men. They fret endlessly about how young men today are being “radicalised” by nasty Right-wing YouTubers such as Andrew Tate, or horrid Right-wing politicians such as Donald Trump. 

Yet they never apply this word “radicalised” to young women. Why not? I suspect it’s because these politicians and commentators tend to be progressive themselves. Therefore, they see no problem with young women becoming drastically more progressive. In their view, the more progressive someone is, the better. So the fault lies entirely with young men, for failing to emulate young women’s lurch to the Left.

Personally, though, I think this lurch Leftwards should alarm us all. The future of Western civilisation is already threatened by our collapsing birth rates. And this sudden ideological chasm between the sexes is only going to make the crisis worse. No one’s going to be forming couples at all any more, if, on every first date, the woman asks, “What do you think of Gramsci?”, and the man replies, “He’s the type of striker Man Utd are crying out for.”

It’s a chilling thought. So clearly something must be done. Politicians must spend less time obsessing over the radicalisation of young men, and start paying attention to the radicalisation of young women, instead.

As it happens, the Labour Party has announced that, when it’s in power, it will help to combat the influence that Andrew Tate has on boys. Surely it would make more sense to help combat the influence The Guardian has on girls. 

Otherwise, the only way young men are going to get a girlfriend is by frantically boning up on George Monbiot and Owen Jones. And if that’s what the future has to hold, perhaps Western civilisation isn’t worth saving, after all. 

[ Via: https://archive.md/WlLXk ]

==

Apparently, it's not "radicalization" when you're calling for the extermination of the Jews; so sexist and racist that you call everyone else "oppressors"; teaching kids about the objectively true mythology of metaphysical "gender" thetans; advocating for the compulsory elimination of all privately-owned property and its forcible redistribution; and/or chanting for the dismantling of society itself.

No, that's not radicalization. It's just the self-evident values of all right-thinking people.

🤷‍♂️🤷‍♀️

[rad4learning]

Radfems - I highly recommend reading some stuff from before 1975. Learn more about why 2nd wave feminism emerged when it did. Learn about the conflicts we're repeating.

There are no simple answers to how we deal with the question of uniting as women with all of our differences; however we can learn from the successes and failures of the past.

[milfygerard]

literally so many people my age who were online in 06 have talked about how they were targeted and groomed by strangers on the internet. Kids have been sold extremism and abuse from the internet since theyve had access to it. I do think the internet is worse but dont pretend it was ever a safe or healthy place for kids to hang out

[wild-wombytch]

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Reduxx (@reduxx.mag)

Everyone should watch this video ☝️!

Also as a bonus, here's the top comment and I think it explains well the issue and how it ends up being about male privileges again :

[dreamteamemojis]

.

[gf-boyfriend]

[thecreepycrawlersss]

our mother is so poisoned by propaganda that she literally called us sick for saying “this country is built on harming people and stealing land, do you really think that our government isn’t corrupt ?” like... and you say WE don’t know basic us history 💀💀

white cishet liberal is confronted with basic facts about the usa, yells and cries in response

[sapphia]

only just realising tumblr genuinely believes that everyone else shares their political opinions

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: John Burn-Murdoch

Published: Jan 26, 2024

One of the most well-established patterns in measuring public opinion is that every generation tends to move as one in terms of its politics and general ideology. Its members share the same formative experiences, reach life’s big milestones at the same time and intermingle in the same spaces. So how should we make sense of reports that Gen Z is hyper-progressive on certain issues, but surprisingly conservative on others?

The answer, in the words of Alice Evans, a visiting fellow at Stanford University and one of the leading researchers on the topic, is that today’s under-thirties are undergoing a great gender divergence, with young women in the former camp and young men the latter. Gen Z is two generations, not one.

In countries on every continent, an ideological gap has opened up between young men and women. Tens of millions of people who occupy the same cities, workplaces, classrooms and even homes no longer see eye-to-eye.

In the US, Gallup data shows that after decades where the sexes were each spread roughly equally across liberal and conservative world views, women aged 18 to 30 are now 30 percentage points more liberal than their male contemporaries. That gap took just six years to open up.

Germany also now shows a 30-point gap between increasingly conservative young men and progressive female contemporaries, and in the UK the gap is 25 points. In Poland last year, almost half of men aged 18-21 backed the hard-right Confederation party, compared to just a sixth of young women of the same age.

Outside the west, there are even more stark divisions. In South Korea there is now a yawning chasm between young men and women, and it’s a similar situation in China. In Africa, Tunisia shows the same pattern. Notably, in every country this dramatic split is either exclusive to the younger generation or far more pronounced there than among men and women in their thirties and upwards.

The #MeToo movement was the key trigger, giving rise to fiercely feminist values among young women who felt empowered to speak out against long-running injustices. That spark found especially dry tinder in South Korea, where gender inequality remains stark, and outright misogyny is common.

In the country’s 2022 presidential election, while older men and women voted in lockstep, young men swung heavily behind the right-wing People Power party, and young women backed the liberal Democratic party in almost equal and opposite numbers.

Korea’s is an extreme situation, but it serves as a warning to other countries of what can happen when young men and women part ways. Its society is riven in two. Its marriage rate has plummeted, and birth rate has fallen precipitously, dropping to 0.78 births per woman in 2022, the lowest of any country in the world.

Seven years on from the initial #MeToo explosion, the gender divergence in attitudes has become self-sustaining. Survey data show that in many countries the ideological differences now extend beyond this issue. The clear progressive-vs-conservative divide on sexual harassment appears to have caused — or at least is part of — a broader realignment of young men and women into conservative and liberal camps respectively on other issues.

In the US, UK and Germany, young women now take far more liberal positions on immigration and racial justice than young men, while older age groups remain evenly matched. The trend in most countries has been one of women shifting left while men stand still, but there are signs that young men are actively moving to the right in Germany, where today’s under-30s are more opposed to immigration than their elders, and have shifted towards the far-right AfD in recent years.

It would be easy to say this is all a phase that will pass, but the ideology gaps are only growing, and data shows that people’s formative political experiences are hard to shake off. All of this is exacerbated by the fact that the proliferation of smartphones and social media mean that young men and women now increasingly inhabit separate spaces and experience separate cultures.

Too often young people’s views are overlooked owing to their low rates of political participation, but this shift could leave ripples for generations to come, impacting far more than vote counts.

==

On average, men are more moderate and centrist in their views while, on average, women are more extremist in their views. Anyone suggesting that men as a whole, or on average, have shifted is gaslighting you, as the evidence does not support this assertion.

"It was always the women, and above all the young ones, who were the most bigoted adherents of the Party, the swallowers of slogans, the amateur spies and nosers-out of unorthodoxy." -- George Orwell, "Nineteen Eighty-Four"

[rustchild]

.

[lem0nademouth]

“how did they not know they were talking to nazis!!!”

y’all. that’s the point. i promise you wouldn’t know either. in fact, many of you talk to nazis regularly and willfully ignore very obvious signs that they are nazis.

someone who has never met a Jewish person or knows nothing about the history of Zionism or Israel or the Diaspora (so, most goyim) probably thinks they are doing the right thing when they are told that they are attending a march against genocide. they (understandably) will not question the potential bigotry they might encounter espoused by people at that event, and they certainly won’t have the instinct to be on the lookout for fascists. and when well meaning but still uneducated people mingle with malicious bigots, they become targets for recruitment. thats. the. whole. point.

this is why i am BEGGING the goyische left to examine the role they play in the rise of radical antisemitism. nazis know they can find people who are primed to believe anything so long as it is framed as being morally correct or justified in far left spaces. and then all they have to do is 1. frame Jewish people as the morally corrupt opposition, and 2. make hating Jewish people sound like the morally superior opinion. extremism is extremism is extremism in every direction and it uses the exact same tactics every time.

so if you find yourself saying something that sounds a hell of a lot like far right rhetoric with some key words swapped out, think about it. propaganda is still propaganda, no matter who says it.

[imabiscuitinthousandworlds]

i said it before and i'll say it again chanting "alerta alerta antifascista" with a bunch of antifascists of every age and various cities is an experience that Does Things to a queer teen punk

[samaspic31]

My irl social circle became so so trans dominated while dropping out i had forgor how bad it feels being in cis dominated institutions

[ivan-fyodorovich-k]

to be fair the further left one side goes the further right the other goes and vice-versa, the two phenomena don't have nothing to do with one another

[umi-archive]

Feeling really weird about this election cycle bc my closest friends are radical and refuse to vote for kamala, and while I totally understand not wanting to tick that box, there is a very real threat of 4 more years of trump and i'm like how.. can you overlook that??? like things might not get that much better under kamala, but they will get so much worse with trump. like we are suffering currently bc of trump's presidency and will continue to suffer for years to come. and they know this. everyone knows this. and yet. they continue to scream proudly that they refuse to vote for kamala, knowing that the only other option is trump, knowing that everything will be even more fucked. and it just makes me question what the fuck people stand on.

we are in california and our vote for president matters a little bit less, so sure, don't vote for kamala. as if it's cool or brave to withhold your vote "bc of principles" while knowing full-well it won't affect the outcome. that's not brave, my guy. that's privilege. but there are radical folks voting in states where it really matters, and they are having to put aside their griefs and frustrations to vote for someone who doesn't represent everything they stand for, and they are doing it because they know it's what's best for everyone as a whole. it doesn't make them less leftist or less principled. obviously everyone needs to make the decision for themselves, and if people can't stand the idea of ticking that box for kamala bc of her political history, they get to make that choice. but to me, it's such a selfish and privileged (and also kind of dumb???) act to withhold your vote knowing that the only other person who could become president is the worst person alive.

it's so confusing and silly to me. people's rights will be taken away but congrats on getting to stand on your principles i guess.

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

Security Treaty Renewal and Okinawa (1970-1)

"At least until the anti-security treaty and Okinawa movements of the early 1970s, the left believed in the utility of continuing the tactic of indefinite campus strikes. The histories of 1968 and afterward, though, have completely neglected the politicization and expansion of campus struggles to nearly all universities in Japan. To this day, the majority of those who research the history of the student movement say nothing about the 1970 anti-security treaty movement or the Okinawa struggle. The majority of researchers understand the movements from 1968 to the early 1970s merely as precursors to the citizens' and social movements that came later. They completely ignore the political processes by which the campus protests became the 1970 anti-security treaty and Okinawa protests. Not only that, but the political movements of the times were portrayed as if they had all fallen apart due to uchi geba [internal violence].

Consider several incidents from this period: the November 1971 Shibuya riot, the mail bomb sent to a police chief in December 1971, the actions of the East Asia Anti-Japanese Armed Front [Higashi Ajia Han-Nichi Busó Sensen), and the bombing of Mitsubishi Heavy Industries headquarters. These were extreme actions, and the people who carried them out were similarly radical. Nevertheless, the majority of intellectuals have ignored the political meanings of these events and have interpreted them as part of a process of increasing militancy and violence in the New Left's internal battles. Moreover, these researchers make no distinction between intra-sect purges and battles between groups. For example, the Red Army incident was treated as an example of growing extremism in the battles between the old and New Left; not only that, but it was portrayed as the only possible outcome of the struggles between these entities.

This is the way in which intellectuals reproduced the historical vision of the ruling class, which emphasizes security and defense of the social order. The result of this development was a rather vague historical consciousness that asserted an unmediated connection between the 1968 student movement and the citizens' and social movements of the 1970s. The effect of this historical consciousness has been enormous, as both the New Left and the old left movements cut themselves off from militant protest and became depoliticized, their leftism reduced to a theory of justice. An intellectual who was at the time labeled "a humanist" described the differences between the old and New Left in this manner: "The New Left is 'new' because it is different from the old Left, which supports socialism and communism. They have taken from the old left an interest in social justice."

A mutual interest in social justice was presented as the common interest of the old and New Left, and the main body of this argument was to turn both the old and new into versions of the American egalitarian liberal movements of the time." Alternatively, the old and New Left were each seen as movements that merely "resisted," on the level of micro-situations within civil society.

In opposition to this dominant historical interpretation, what we must recall and acknowledge is that both the New Left and old left were aiming to broaden the campus struggle by politicizing it and taking it to a national level. Because the movements were connected with the United States-Japan Security Treaty and Okinawa, they were believed to lead inevitably to a revolutionary situation. To put it bluntly, from 1969 to 1970, both the old and the New Left expected a revolution. These were not simply fantasies, though; this expectation was based on a realistic assessment of the situation. What must be remembered, at the very least, is that both the Okinawa and the 1970 security treaty protests were linked to the military. In other words, they were connected to the state's largest violent apparatus.

After 1970, when the left won a majority in elections, they were capable of passing a resolution to exit the security treaty, but doing so would have resulted in a military conflict between the United States and Japan. Even if the left were to gain a majority through peaceful and democratic means, an armed conflict with the United States would inevitably lead to the loss of state power. The Communist Party tried to adopt a policy of popular parliamentarism and structural reform, but there was always an aspect of its program that implied armed conflict with the United States. It was for precisely this reason that the party adopted policies of "waiting for the enemy to attack" and "legitimate self-defense." In 1971, Fuwa Tetsuzo, who worked out the strategy of "popular parliamentarism,” remarked:

In a situation under which the Liberal Democratic Party has a majority in the Diet, it's very difficult for us to form a majority to do anything positive. Even if we are able to keep a lid on the things the LDP majority tries to do against the will of the people through our actions within and without the Diet, it is difficult for us to move things in a different direc- tion... In a situation where the LDP is trying to use its parliamentary majority, there is no option but to look for the intervention of the people, who after all are sovereign.

When it comes to extra-parliamentary action concerning important issues like Okinawa, the people who have a degree of sovereignty outside the Diet, the people who cannot approve of the contents on the agreement on the repatriation of Okinawa, take all sorts of actions to reflect their will in the Diet. Their actions combine with our action in the Diet and make us stronger."

Fuwa appears to be giving a simple outline of party strategy, but we should remember that, at the time, the power behind "extra-parliamentary action" was deemed extremely radical. No matter how far the tilt toward parliamentarism, as long as the party foresaw the arrival of a revolutionary situation, it had to emphasize a strategy that included the exercise of an extra-parliamentary "sovereign power." In connection to this issue, I would like to quote a passage from Kimi no Okinawa [Your Okinawa], which is the most famous document from the Communist Party-affiliated youth and student movement:

Make no mistake, the "US-Japan Security Treaty Prosperity" was squeezed out of the sweat and blood of workers on the mainland. But that is not all. The US-Japan Security Treaty Prosperity was drawn even more from the blood and tears of Okinawans and the blood of the people of Vietnam... Think about it. If you consider Okinawa to be your problem, you can understand the lively crowds of workers fighting for Okinawa in workplaces all over Japan.

The ruling class must be shaking. It's like when that financier, on seeing the whirlpool of the demonstrations in 1960 said "This is a revolution" and dropped his spoon mid-meal. Or like Shin Nitetsu's president Inayama, who, on seeing the results of the provincial 1971 elections said "I no longer understand where Japan is going." The ruling class looks strong, but they are trembling with fear that the anger over pollution, prices, and "rationalization" will flow into the Okinawa protests. 

Both the old and the New Left were united in expecting the arrival of a revolutionary situation. Of course, conflict - some of it armed - continued among the groups who called themselves the "vanguard party" and other groups trying to become the "vanguard party," but one must remember that, at least at the level of the mass movement, there were many points of agreement about the political issues confronting the left. Hirotani Shunji, who directed the University of Tokyo struggle but was later removed from his leadership position, attested to the "unity" of the old and New Left:

They competed with each other in elections for office, but if the results produced, for example, a Minsei council president, a Kakumaru or a Chukaku vice-president, they would have no choice but to work together... The reason they could not accept "Trotskyists" in a unified student front was not because the Trotskyists had an anti-Communist political direction, but because they were groups who trampled over democracy and ripped apart mass organizations. So if the Trotskyists had respected democracy and stopped all their internal violence [uchi geba] we should have joined with them in a unified front, yes.

The Communist Party's approach to the New Left was widely adopted by the party's student activists, including during the anti-security treaty and Okinawa protests. However, the central party clamped down on this loose strategy among student party members. The beginning of the clamp-down was the critique of the "new opportunism."

- Yoshiyuki Koizumi, "The Japanese Communist Party since 1968: Between Revolution and Reform," in Gavin Walker, ed., The Red Years: Theory, Politics and Aesthetics in the Japanese ‘68. London and New York: Verso, 2020. p. 125-129