#leftism is the future

[julianamaius]

Being "too much" and talking about queer and trans issues to people who don't want to hear it. The false allyship of Neoliberal right wing bigots hiding behind acceptability politics. The reality of being a trans woman gatekept from 'actual womanhood' (hint: it's a bunch of bullshit every trans woman is valid and fuck your dumb ass if you say they aren't!)

It's a tiring fucking thing, and yeah I'm new to it. Idk how you've all been handling this inane fucking bullshit all this time, I can't tolerate intolerance like this. The worst part for me, and I'm lucky to have not had this experience before coming out as trans as a white woman, is the fake allyship. Everyone I thought would most jump to my side when I came out has pretty much pushed me under the table, despite the insistence that they're "there for me" and were so over-the-top supportive and actually very weird when I came out as a woman

Like yeah I did NOT look like someone who would identify that way when I started, my transition has been on the dramatic side in how much my entire personality and entire face has changed. But now there's no excuse, a year into HRT. I've got the voice kind of down (though kind of fuck that too but I do what I can), I've got the makeup, I pass in bigoted areas, I dress as well as I can being broke as shit and unable to work while I change my name through all the agencies under the sun at cost to me

And those people, the ones who were so adamant about having my back are the ones treating me the least like a human, and least of all like a normal fucking woman. Like I am not an alien, and in terms of being around me it's 1000x better and more fun than it's ever been! I'm fucking happy, after all these years I'm finally happy and have so much going on and am thriving but NOW it's the aunts who jumped to congratulate me on starting HRT alone with no help at the jump who treat me like a non-human

Funny thing too is all the people I was most scared of being around are the ONLY ones who treat me like a normal fucking human being. My girlfriend, her dad they treat me more normally than anyone who has known me forever and should be there but absolutely are not. And now it's my therapist who throws her hands up and says 'it is what it is' when I talk about the deadnaming that happens at every media when a trans person is being targeted, when I talk about being almost assaulted in a parking lot or how the very real fear of being assaulted feeds into my already existent hypervigilance from a very difficult childhood to say the least

It's all the people that I trusted the most emotionally who have, after its all said and done and we've talked about and been close over the ways people can fail us and worked with them to do better, who have let me down. They're the ones who seem to have the most discomfort with my mere existence as a trans woman, as the most beautiful woman in my family to them I am not a woman at all, I'm something else to be handled with care and the worst part is that it's not even talked about

The best way it seems to handle me, to them, is to avoid every step I make and pretend I don't exist, after all the shit it took to get through. It cuts me so deep, I can handle James with the punisher tattoo wanting to rock my shit in the grocery store parking lot but when I get home and I let the shield down and you tell me you don't want trans women in sports, that's "it is what it is just deal with it" to being hated at large, to having no voice to combat people calling for genocide who want me dead, who treat me and other trans women like disposable non-human garbage, when that happens it hurts more emotionally than any real threat to my person

And the fucked up part is of course I'm lucky, I'm white I'm passing I'm pretty, it worked out for me! And here it still is that I'm treated like a disposable napkin in my life in the closest relationships I have poured so much of myself into with so little restraint of love and care, with so much of my best intents and actions. It fucking hurts, so bad. And the reality is of course I'm alone with it because there's not another trans person in my life. I wanted to believe, desperately wanted to believe the people in my life could show up that aren't trans and understand the things I need and go through and not treat me like a sideshow. It seems, on so many counts I've been wrong

At this point I'd actually rather be friends with the person who's loud and open about their bigotry because when we get past the talking points they've been fed they're so often actually the ones that support me FOR REAL, not this neoliberal false-acceptance bullshit that has cut me so deep time and time again in only a single year. I'm tired, I didn't want this. I love being trans alone but I'd never have chosen this minefield if I'd been given any say at all.

It's hard to keep going sometimes but I will, it's just sad that others really think they're "helping" when they're actually pulling me down with their fake 'feels good for them' surface level 'acceptance' that is used to obfuscate the ugly bigotry they refuse to acknowledge, challenge or overcome beneath it all. I'm trans, I'm happy and I'm also so so alone and exhausted and it's hard even when the bulk of things work out in transition

Thanks for hearing me vent because there are fuck all people in my life that actually, when it's all said and done, actually want to support me and listen to this shit which is a daily thing I have to grapple with. I guess it's not important to them

[jasontoddsmommyissues]

This whole Kamala Harris debacle has shown me how many leftist talking points are coming from privileged people whose only connection to politics is the (usually surface level) theory they’ve looked up.

[gnome-punk]

Text: When someone asks my political views

Picture of a book titled "Everybody has a house and everybody eats"

[whereserpentswalk]

There will come a time, when our cities still stand, and their rulers are dead. When the cold take shelter from the winter sky in office buildings that have ceased to serve a purpose, and the old werehouses will be used for festivals, for people who wont have to wake up early for work the next day. And beautiful train tracks will roll over long abandoned highways. And the soft December snow will fall on an oil pipline, long abandoned and beyond use, that failed to burn it away, and a family of wolves will take shelter below the steel tube, not knowing what it was. And two girls will kiss, in the abandoned church of a god who hated them, a god who hasn't been worshipped in this city in living memory, and they'll say a soft prayer to Artemis, as they fall asleep below of broken statue of christ. And one day so many evils of the world, will be nothing more then a bad memory.

[hereswhere]

American liberals will seriously be like, "vote for genocode lite or you're a bad person and responsible for genocide plus winning."

If that makes you feel better for voting for a genocidaire, fine okay. But outside of the usa your leftism is centre-right, and we can see you.

Your entire government, BOTH SIDES, are fascist and all you do is vote, and nothing changes.

The rest of the world watches this stupidity and arrogance, and we seethe with hatred.

You do not live in a democracy and your hegemonic empire is destroying the world.

Can you critically think, can you prioritise and organise?

Can you spineless cunts rise up?

[grapefruiters]

shit feels bad man

[wanderingmind867]

Only way I'd accept money being a thing is if we stopped caring about things about debt and the deficit. Out of money? Just print more! Stop imposing consequences through debt! Debt is a social construct! Get rid of debt, and money would be at least slightly more tolerable. I'd still prefer it be abolished, but I'd take a heavy devaluation of money over what we've got now! Nothing can be worse than what we've got now!

[troythecatfish]

[progressive--american--politics]

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[against-forms-recognizable]

Okay, so, here's the thing, here's where a lot of my anarchism comes from.

Let's go all the way back, back to where humans came from, the ancestral environment. In the ancestral environment, when we're all hunter gatherers, sometimes there's scarcity. And when there's scarcity, it's who you know and the nature of those relationships which determines whether or not you survive. So, being a social animal, the degree to which you manipulate the social environment is a huge factor in that.

A lot of the ways we do this are through social structures, phantasms. We have a lot of them floating around; gender, morality, honor, justice, family. These are all things that don't actually exist materially. They only exist as a linking of concepts, a constellation of ideas that we reify into a system. And we use these to control each other, to create a social environment that is more suitable to getting our needs met. They form the bedrock of our civilization and society.

We enforce these structures most often by methods of social correction; isolation, harassment, bullying, and so on, to make people get with the program. And when that fails sometimes there is violent coercion, in modern times usually by the body that maintains a monopoly on violence and violent coercion, the state.

But because these things don't actually exist materially, they are flexible. We can add or remove stars from these constellations while maintaining mostly the same recognizable shape and other people still recognize it and might not even realize we changed it at all. And we all do this, all the time, generally unconsciously, in ways that favor us. This is where identity politics comes from, right? All of the toxicity within it. Everyone is trying to weaponize these structures to extract material benefit from the social environment by reshaping these relations to be more favorable to them.

But these abstractions are largely the way we make sense of the world. It's the foundation of language and cognition and communication. So anything we do together will always result in people playing these games with each other, defecting in this grand prisoner's dilemma.

This applies to communism, too - I think every communist has started out well-meaning, the marxist-leninists included. The thing is that we are fundamentally unable to participate in society without trying to turn it to our benefit, it is hard-wired into us, we are so good at it that we don't even realize when we are doing it. And it applies to anarcho-communism, as well, even in the absence of a coercive state people can still accrue soft social power and utilize that to create a social hierarchy - even a simple reading of Ursula K. Le Guin's The Dispossessed, which posits a flawed anarcho-communist utopia, reveals it as an investigation into how even if you start out with true believers, applying it on a society wide level will result in the vast majority of people talking the talk without walking the walk.

So, at present, because I don't really see a way out of this, my anarchism is mostly formulated as a critical orientation at these structures which create hierarchy and domination, a toolbox of critique that we can use to break them down, a continual process that must be adhered to as everyone will always be trying to build new ones up. Conscious deconstruction, of our unconscious constructions. This doesn't mean I don't think things can be better, that I don't think a positive social project is possible. I just don't know how to get there, right now, with a method I'm sure won't just end up making things worse.

[wiserebeltiger]

Bernie Sanders could turn out to be the socialist Barry Goldwater.

In the long term, the left may win out, because people want healthcare and affordable housing. That or we could all be living in Amazon pods in 20 years.

[whereserpentswalk]

We've created a world where people crunch numbers and do manual labor so that the robots will have free time to chat and sing.

[dougielombax]

Conservatives seem to live in a world with such a fragile sense of reality that it needs to be constantly upheld for them. At all costs.

Otherwise they’ll run around and injure themselves before dying from a combination of shock and injuries like a fragile, self-destructive horse.

“BUT THEY PROMISED!!!!! THEY PROMISED US!!!!!!! THEY SAID THE WEALTH WOULD TRICKLE DOWN!!!!!!!!!!”

[hussyknee]

The worst thing the whole Harry Potter discourse has done is making fandom parrot the take: "Death of the Author doesn't apply when they're living and profiting off their work." Idk how we can come back from that one tbh.

[gnome-punk]

Article: U.S. House overwhelming approves bill backing record military spending.

Working Families Party comments: Imagine investing this money into people instead of the military.

[troythecatfish]