CleverOleg

This is something I have felt for a long time, but with everything going on with that dead fascist, it seems to be really top of mind right now. I am white, for the record.

White society operates on plausible deniability of racism within itself. The number of times in my life when my fellow white people have said something that everyone would agree is definitely racist is actually fairly small, and concentrated into the time I was a teen or so. And not like people were ever afraid of saying it around me, I was very non-confrontational growing up and never really pushed back on anything bad someone said.

The idea is to never say anything openly racist that someone could call you out on. You don't say "I think black people are naturally violent", you say "I only go downtown for sports events, it's to dangerous there". You don't say you don't want to live in a neighborhood with a lot of minorities. You just... naturally end up in the lily-white suburbs. You will say you are open to dating people of other races, but just a coincidence that it's never happened. You agree that slavery was evil but you also get really worked up when your kids learn about slavery in history class.

Maybe these aren't even the best examples. I don't even like citing specific examples because it's an entire ecosystem. It's all about never saying enough that someone - even a fellow white person - could call you out on. I think a lot of the time, it's about lying to yourself as much as it's lying to everyone else. Because white folks have this notion that racism is "bad", and no one thinks they are a bad person... but at the same time we live in a fundamentally white supremacist society where NOT being anti-racist fundamentally says something about you anyway.

And Charlie Kirk was as good at this as any white person. I explained to someone the other day what Kirk said about black pilots. And this person responded with "well that's not racist, he wasn't saying black pilots aren't competent he is saying you can't know because of eeeeevil DEI!" You can take all the comments he ever said about race and pretend like he wasn't racist (according to white society) because he never said the exact words "I believe white people are superior to other races", because according to white people that is literally the only form of racism that can exist. Hell, some will even defend the statement "I just like being around my fellow white people" as not racist but just a form of personal preference.

And once you see all this, it can make you feel crazy. You can see so much racism among all your fellow whiteys, and yet everyone denies it. Everyone has an excuse, everyone has a reason it's not racist. Not looking for sympathy or anything, just describing what it's like.

Ever since he shed this mortal coil, I’ve been looking for one source for a lot of the worst stuff Kirk said. I think Coates does that really well here. It’s mostly a compendium of some of the worst stuff that isn’t getting attention in the media, even the media that’s critical of him (which seems to be focusing on what he said about guns). And he sources all of the quotes. Coates isn’t going full Peter Daou but it feels like he is radicalizing before our eyes.

Sending this to someone in my life who was only vaguely familiar with Kirk but since he got shot has become a bit obsessed with him. They told me “the media is taking what he said out of context” and that they “didn’t agree with everything he said but a lot of what he said made sense”.

I get this is something marginalized folks must live with on a daily basis and none of this is surprising, but I’m a white cishet guy and this stuff is eye opening and (further) radicalizing to me.

The entire social response to Kirk getting merc’d is literally the meme. Down to bone.

White, cishet, male-dominated society (and the mainstream media that extends from it) has decided that, okay, maybe Kirk said some very pointed or occasionally untoward comments. But really, can any of those words compare to being willing to debate in the Marketplace of Ideas? Ok, maybe he was a bit racist. Maybe he didn’t care for trans folks. Sure, that’s all a bit rude. But he was willing to discuss his ideas and be civil about it (ok, maybe not civil, but he didn’t kill anyone over it), and in the end that’s all that really matters, right?

Politicians, the media, and a good chunk of society is basically saying how marginalized people may feel about all this is entirely irrelevant. Any sort of speech that is racist, sexist, or bigoted is excusable so long as the subject serves the broader neoliberal, white supremacist, settler project.

Marg bar Amrika.

I will serve in the PLA and fight and die for the Peoples Republic of China if you do.

I ask because in the US, the media has been obfuscating the Democrats unpopularity and loss in 2024 to things like manosphere influencers to being too “woke” to lack of enthusiasm among voters for ephemeral and unknowable reasons. These are all BS of course, but there’s enough lack of clarity on these issues to confuse people.

But the incredible levels of unpopularity that Labour and Starmer are experiencing seem much more stark. I mean, they just won an election and their popularity has nosedived. The only things the government seems to be doing is loudly proclaiming support for Israel, proscribing PA, destroying everyone’s privacy online, and imposing austerity. I don’t think anyone could possibly accuse Labour of being too far left since the election.

How is the media covering this? Is everyone just trying not to bring it up or ask why Labour has become so unpopular? Are they pinning it on Starmer being an unlikeable twat? I’m assuming the media won’t dare suggest Labour is doing very unpopular things, especially in relation to Gaza… but it feels like at least from my POV the elephant in the room is now just too big to ignore.

Usually discussion of what to name “Your Party” ends up being joke time. So I thought maybe one thread where we make actual suggestions?

I had one idea that came to me in the shower this morning:

Better Way

Here’s my argument. Most folks really hate the status quo. They hate capitalism and they hate neoliberalism, even if they don’t fully understand what it is they hate and much less able to conceptualize what it is they hate and what the solutions are. All that Reform and the Tories can offer is racism, transphobia, and a hollow, farcical nationalism. Labour explicitly says there’s nothing better than this, so tighten those belts and eat your spoonful of austerity (along with racism and transphobia ofc).

“Better Way”, to me, communicates that you don’t have to accept what’s currently on offer: there is something better. And the party can and should articulate what those better things are. “Better Way” acknowledges peoples’ dissatisfaction with the state of things and the current political options. The public is told you have no other choices than shitty ones, but there is something better out there.

But more interested to hear your ideas.

It goes without saying that capitalism sucks and corporations suck. I don’t have loyalty to any “brand”. But I do care about me and my comrades being able to afford to live.

There’s that phrase that “it’s expensive to be poor”, which I think is very true. When you’re poor, you can only afford the cheapest commodities. These inevitably break, so you have to spend more money on a replacement.

I’m trying to break out of this cycle myself as much as possible. Instead of buying the cheapest replacement, I’m trying to save up my money to buy a replacement that will last. Unfortunately, researching this is hard. There’s so much astroturfing and “sponsored content”. So I figured I’d ask my fellow hexbears, what products do you know of are made in a way that they will last and actually cost less than buying replacements? There’s a few suggestions I can offer:

I used to work in a pretty solid outdoor gear store, and I was really impressed with the Deuter backpacks. They were always really durable and cheaper than Osprey. I have one I bought in 2007 and I still use it regularly today.

I own a Casio G-Shock watch. The “squares” are usually relatively affordable. The bands and batteries can be swapped out. I’m pretty tough on mine and it still looks mint. I do expect I’ll be wearing mine for a very long time. Or if you don’t want to spend money the F-91W is like $10 and still works well even though it’s not ruggedized. Worn by Bin Laden, too.

Something in the ideal category of durable and cheap are Sungait sunglasses. They’re like $15-$20 each and have UV400 protection. Mine have lasted a while and have handled a lot of being thrown around

As a parent, we have some Hape toys our kids beat up and they stay together well. My wife bought some Primary dot com clothes thinking they would last but they don’t seem any better than the super cheap clothes at Walmart or Target we normally buy.

That post about some neoliberal momo not understanding what Marx said about value got me remembering something back from my undergrad econ program. One of my primary professors was a true libertarian. And the way he viewed Marx was... something.

On one hand, he of course tried to shit on Marxism. I remember in one of the first classes of Macro 101, he brought out the "labor theory of value is wrong because mud pies don't have value" line (this is something Marx specifically addresses and debunks within the first few pages of chapter 1 of Capital). He would unironically say "the problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other peoples' money". He praised Pinochet for being an "economic miracle worker" and said that high unemployment at the time in Europe was due to "socialist policy".

Yet at the same time, he also had this weird admiration for Marx and Capital specifically. I don't think he ever read it or even bothered to understand it. But he did see Capital as the logical conclusion of 19th century political economy - an unbroken line from Adam Smith to Marx. Despite being a libertarian and someone who did read philosophy, he just thought that Smith, Ricardo, Marx et al were wrong to focus on "value", and it's origins in labor. So while he admired Smith as the guy who put down on paper a lot of the first ideas of how an economy works, he ultimately saw him as "wrong". And Marx just inadvertently showed how silly it is to come up with theories of value. According to this professor, Marx "killed" political economy. Marx was somehow "wrong" and also a giant of political economy.

I remember he squared all this by thinking it was the marginalists/Austrians who got it right by focusing on supply and demand. That the forces that push supply and demand are all that matter, and that we only need to understand what drives prices because prices are the very way that the gods of capitalism speak to us. Since price movements are all that matter, he thought economists should focus on what are the "rules" that drive human behavior because behavior drives prices. And this is why (according to him) he was a libertarian: it was guys like Friedman and Hayek who truly understood hUmAn NaTuRe. Humans are always self-interested, we seek to maximize utility, etc. Start from those first principles and you can figure out your economy.

So it was eye-opening to me when I actually read Capital, how it showed how someone I looked up to really didn't have a clue about what he was talking about. Marx DID bring political economy to its logical conclusion, it's just that the capitalists didn't like the conclusion he arrived at. So instead, they do what my old econ prof did: don't bother learning what Marx said, just shit on it with pithy quips and just say SoCiALisM dOeSn'T wOrK. No one will challenge you because no one reads Marx. Because as people like Hilferding and Bukharin showed many decades ago, the economists who think they can actually take on Marx and defeat him only end up embarrassing themselves (not to mention how Marx knew what he detractors would say and specifically addressed their points in Capital). But if you never engage with Marx in the first place....

(fwiw he also shit on Keynes who I do think had some correct ideas. IIRC he thought Keynesianism worked for a couple decades during and after WW2 because reasons but that the last few decades showed that monetarism and libertarian economics is the one true gospel. This was before the GFC in 2008/09 of course...)

Just sharing this as a "does anyone else ever feel this way?" post

I am fortunate to have a number of friends I have kept close most of my life, and a lot of family members who I am close with. I am unfortunate in that most of these people skew reactionary.

When I was a lib, it was easy for me to just write off political differences as inconsequential, especially since politics was a very minor part of my relationship with them. But now that I'm a commie, I've found it harder to not only keep up these relationships, but to actually feel love and care for people who I have loved and cared for for decades. Now in general, this isn't much of a problem with friends because I moved away from my hometown, and these relationships are kept on life support by group chats. These chats are largely just meme shit or talking about sports. But I've been surprised by an actual changing of feelings for two people who were my closest friends at one point.

But there is one person in particular for whom I am struggling with this. This person is my oldest and closest friend. This person knows I skew left but not as far left as I actually am. And I knew this person had libertarian leanings, but politics was something they never actually cared about in the past. In the last 6-12 months, they've gotten more strident and vocal with the libertarian crap (for example, telling me yesterday that they think it's ok that 16 million people will lose Medicaid coverage because the government shouldn't be in the business of healthcare). And as they have begun to be more serious and into their libertarian ideology, I find myself not feeling those same feelings of love and care, and really not sure I want to be this person's friend anymore. Someone I went to grade school with and really is like a brother. It's like, there's something about the libertarian ideology that if someone holds to it, I find it so repugnant that I can't be in a relationship with person. Not to mention this person has all sorts of anti-communist brainworms, which is why I've held back telling them how far left I've gone. They're genuinely not racist or anti-LGBTQ, I don't really think they are a "bad" person... but I just am so against their politics that I find I am starting to lack those feelings of love and friendship you should have for a close friend now.

This just feels jarring to me as I have always had very stable affections for people, and have always held love for people despite disagreements and seeing things differently. It feels like there is this massive gulf in how we see the world (because there is ofc) and that just sorta kills how I feel about this person.

Anyone else?

Link

I think it’s a good statement, short and to the point. The replies are absolute poison though, hasbara bots really honing in on them. Feds will try and make something stick but it doesn’t sound like he was even a member.

(I want to preface this by saying my problems are of course absolutely nothing compared to what Palestinians and especially Palestinian parents must go through. I am only expressing these feelings in case there are others who feel similarly and don’t want to feel alone).

I have little kids. For over a year and a half now, I cannot shake this feeling. I don’t really know what to call it. But I cannot accept that my kids have this happy, comfortable life while there are little kids just like them being tortured to death under rubble, in fire, and by IOF bullets. Why am I in this position while Palestinian parents are in theirs? How can reality be this warped? I look at my kids, I can see them experiencing what thousands of kids in Gaza have had to endure, and my brain kinda shuts down. And in those moments it’s actually hard to be around my kids. This isn’t all the time - most often I’m able to be a good, present parent. But in that state it’s like I don’t want to be reminded that children even exist in this world.

It’s like, sometimes when my kid is laughing I can only thing about how there’s another kid half a world away who is screaming in pain, or experiencing terror and sadness in a way I cannot comprehend.

I was raised as an evangelical Christian. The main reason I deconverted years ago was I could not accept the idea of eternal conscious torment in hell for all unbelievers. I could not accept that that was how the universe worked. That was nearly 15 years ago. I hadn’t even thought about it much until these last 19 months. But I recognize the feeling since it’s all coming back. I see kids being tormented and killed, and it’s like my brain cannot accept this is reality.

Seeing that little light inside my children, and know that thousands of little lights are getting snuffed out… I don’t know, I just don’t have any more words or tears.