A comment from /r/stupidpol

ThatQueerWerewolf · 2020-03-04T22:38:54+00:00

Yup. A lot of people won't even try to understand why people join the other side or what those people are going through. They're content to just brand everyone in that group "evil" while attacking anyone who might even be on their side but doesn't share their exact beliefs.

So many of my leftist acquaintances just like to jerk off over how good they are for prioritizing minorities and women, while rarely showing people kindness on a personal level. They'll continuously publicly refer to large groups of people as "trash" and "scum" and bash them to no end while justifying it as "venting," but if any member of those groups voices discomfort, they'll immediately prove that they really do hate these groups by harassing and mocking the person in question for not being willing to sit there and take their abuse. Being an "ally" no longer means supporting oppressed groups, it means admitting that you are part of the problem just by existing, and letting people take out their frustrations on you because having power/privilege (or having people think that you do) means that nothing can actually hurt you, right?

2020-03-04T23:01:43+00:00

It's this weird notion of original sin that is placed onto men through the eyes and perspective of leftist, feminist and their sympathizers.

Aaod · 2020-03-05T00:22:20+00:00

If you want another example of this you have religion in rural areas. The left completely abandoned rural areas and the government is either missing or actively detrimental so they cling to religion much to the confusion of leftists because the church is the only one helping them. When Jake lost his job it was the pastor who brought him groceries, when Jane fell off the wagon it was the church that provided her refuge and people to talk to about her demons, etc. I am a militant atheist, but even I can see why they cling to religion in those areas.

LeftNatTay · 2020-03-05T06:33:09+00:00

Ayo Bro so I was an AnCom and part of the super woke clan of Leftist, but I had a burgeoning black nationalist ideology growing... and my Lefty friends were very flaky and inconsistent about my people's issues and to make matters worse, a lot of them retweeted a lot of #BlackMenAreTrash tweets in solidarity with Black Women, which led to me feeling betrayed. If it weren't for Marxist-Leninists, I'd likely radicalize in the wrong direction, becoming a Garveyite or NOI/Black Hebrew Israelite at worst. It didn't help that my general view of race relations was (and is) really low and the fact that my lefty friends thought the best way to fix it was either give us fake white guilted nonsense or encourage us to go into insurrection (which would have gotten us killed).

But one thing I will say about that quote is that... it works the other way as well. My lefty friends may have been fake and unhelpful, but my turn to Left Nationalism is a result of the right wing status quo and I think this quote should really be analyzing why people reject liberalism in favor of being radical or reactionary. The "Left" (whatever the fuck it means in this subreddit) isn't the sole nor primary problem here and I think that quote misses a bigger picture

Talik1978 · 2020-03-04T21:08:58+00:00

I will leave this here.

https://youtu.be/SSH5EY-W5oM

Support, belonging, and acceptance is what radicalizes extremists.

Support, love, and acceptance also gets people out of it.

hatefulreason · 2020-03-04T21:57:03+00:00

this is why eastern europe still longs for communism, but without the SJW crap

spudmix · 2020-03-04T20:24:16+00:00

Stereotyping hugely here, but yes; the left* has an empathy problem. Issues are approached as if cis/straight/white/male people are at 100% happiness/power/generic positive value, and therefore we do not need to address their concerns with any urgency - let's concentrate on anyone else. But of course, that's not the case. Throwing an arbitrary number at it, cis/straight/white/male folks are at 45% happiness/power/positive things and while there are definitely disadvantages that come with not being cis/straight/white/male, when it comes to assigning effort towards solving problems that effort should be roughly proportional to the absolute numbers, not relative to the cis/straight/white/man who has the fewest disadvantages.

In simple terms, I believe it is moral to assign more care and effort to those folk who are disadvantaged - but not all of it. The stereotypical left* makes you feel like all of the care and effort should go to those most disadvantaged, and it feels like they miss the 55% of happiness/power/positive things deficit that most humans share, despite whatever intersectional identity they are.

Now, here come the bits that are going to get me downvoted:

1) The "bad" parts of the left* get far more airtime than they deserve, and most of that airtime is because of people complaining about them. A fair portion of this sub's content is people getting outraged over whatever dumb feminist #234098 said, which gives people the false impression that the average feminist is in line with that, or has a moral imperative to "call out" such behaviour if they are to be valid. This is futile and self-destructive. It is not only pragmatic but also far more realistic to think of the average person on the left/right/feminist/MRA/whatever spectrum as being a totally normal, sensible, egalitarian person with perhaps a slight leaning towards their strategy for a better tomorrow. Don't make the mistake of demonising out-groups.

2) I often see people getting outraged by effectively being told to sit down and shut up, because it's time to listen to someone else. Men get told this too often; it's truly unfair. However, sometimes, this is actually the right thing to be told. The left* (again stereotyping) is very, very bad at communicating with people outside of their overton window. That doesn't actually mean we (the left) are wrong, and there really are times and places when it's not your turn to speak and be heard. Men need to be recognised when they are vulnerable and willing to speak out, but there are also many instances of people online using white/men's/etc. issues as a bludgeon to derail PoC/women's/etc. issues - that's one example of a time when you really should sit down and shut up. Start a new, positive, vulnerable conversation somewhere else if you feel you want to talk about something. Be willing to change your thinking.

In summary, you can be hurtful and right (the stereotypical left, sometimes), and you can also be hurt and wrong (the stereotypical cis/straight/white/man online, sometimes).

With all of that said, I also strongly believe two things about these issues.

First, the vast majority of people are affected by their "feels" and by systems and structures to a far greater extent than we think, especially when we think of men. Nobody is really very rational or realistic or logical. We should not assign individual blame - guilt is a terrible motivator and systemic solutions are almost universally kinder and more effective.

Second, and with respect to the first, while I don't think assigning blame (fault) to a person is useful, it is critical that a person does take responsibility. A vulnerable person who goes "full Hitler because their flaky, lefty friends have done fuck all to help them" has been failed by their friends, but that does not absolve them of responsibility for going full Hitler. They are responsible for recognising that, apologising, and making amends even if the best solution is for the systems surrounding them to get better at supporting them in the future.

*the loud internet cultures who people think are representative of "the left", but that actually doesn't matter when we're talking about image and interpretation.

VoiceOfTheMillenium · 2020-03-05T02:59:57+00:00

> The amount of vulnerable people I've seen go full Hitler because their flaky, lefty friends have done fuck all to help them when they were desperate, homeless and hungry. But the Nazi's where there; fed them, clothed them and told them by the very virtue of their skin that they were loved and important.

Might agree with the first part, certainly disagree with the second.

2020-03-05T10:19:58+00:00

I agree 100%. The online left have done more to push people to the right than any other group has. It just angers me that this is the case and that it's almost impossible to talk to any leftist about this without them dismissing what you're saying and calling you a "right wing chud". The only prominent leftist I can think of who talks about this is Vaush and he is hated by virtually everyone. This sub and that post just gives me hope. Hope that we can actually pull more young people to the left instead of the far right.

serpentineeyelash · 2020-03-05T08:04:48+00:00

I'm not aware of Nazis doing charity work!

But I do agree that the right and the far-right (at least for the moment) has become more willing to let more people speak, while the left has become more censorious. That's why much of their recent recruitment has occurred online. And to some extent they are more willing to address some of the male issues caused by feminism (though they'd also worsen the deeper male issues of traditionalism).

As someone else in this thread put it, support, belonging, and acceptance is what the right sometimes offers more of. It's one of the many reasons I created this subreddit - for all its faults, it's an attempt to build some small section of the left to which male advocates can belong.

CellGel1 · 2020-03-09T12:26:01+00:00

I think /u/jolly_mcfats explained this phenomenon beautifully several years ago when asked why some MRAs associate with the far right. It doesn't quite apply to the right in general, but I still consider it relevant:

Becoming a MRA does basically require that you stop trusting common wisdom about what is and isn't a hate group. You become distrustful of media because the MRM is most commonly only given hatchet job treatment from publications. It's often called "taking the red pill" because you begin to see that public sentiment and reality on the ground are radically out of line, once trusted institutions are effectively propaganda, and the morality of almost everyone you know and love seems twisted and broken. You see labels like "racist" and "homophobic" leveraged more for strategic purposes than principle. You see the SPLC as laughable rather than a respectable watch dog.

So basically, social norms affect you a lot less. You've already defected HARD against prevailing sentiment, and resigned yourself to the fact that you can't use public sentiment as a moral compass- you're already a homophobic, racist, misogynist in the eyes of most people. Norms only work on the in-group, and you've already become the out-group.

And so- yes, when you encounter another group that has been similarly pilloried, you aren't going to have the same knee-jerk response that you would have had before they had come for you. You won't really care that you read in the new york post that that group was racist or sexist or a hate group because the same thing has been said about you, and you don't agree with their judgement of you, so why should you trust them about this other group?

I've previously tried to write here about how I see AMR and David Futrelle as effectively radicalizing the MRM by refusing to acknowledge any legitimacy or moderate constituency of the MRM, and giving a platform to the most objectionable elements of the movement while ignoring the existence of the rest of it. This creates a strong barrier towards entry into the MRM, but it means that once you cross that threshold, and see the disparity between the portrayal of the MRM and the actual MRAs you interact with- you've completely lost any trust in the opinion of those people. Our social mental immune system is compromised- it's just a question of whether you think it was compromised by the agitprop of anti-mras or the process of rejecting it.

But I do think that even without that normative pressure- the alt right makes it pretty clear that yes, they are about white nationalism. No, they don't really give a shit about mexican, black, asian, jewish, middle eastern, gay, bi, or trans men. If it turns out that you don't either- then a transition to the alt right may be in the cards. However, if you became a MRA because your principles actually are humanitarian, you're likely to decide that the alt-right isn't a good fit. If your vision of an ideal future for men involves having more freedom- then traditionalist rhetoric is going to be objectionable, and there is plenty of that in the alt-right.

Basically, MRAs live in a post-shame world (it's the price of entry), but thankfully not a post-rational world. Where shame fails, persuasion and reason should still suffice. It's possible that the MRM will act as a gateway in that it's not actually that objectionable, and recognizing that strips the media, academia, and activist groups like the SPLC of moral credibility- moral credibility that might have been a bulwark against the alt-right. Basically, someone cried wolf when there wasn't one, and now a real wolf has arrived.

Title	A comment from /r/stupidpol
Author	[deleted]
Upvotes	40
Comments	90
Date	March 4, 2020 6:52 PM UTC (6 years ago)
Subreddit	Posted in /r/LeftWingMaleAdvocates
Original Link	https://old.reddit.com/r/LeftWingMaleAdvocates/comments/fdhp65/a_comment_from_rstupidpol/
Archive Link	https://theredarchive.com/r/LeftWingMaleAdvocates/a-comment-from-rstupidpol.1200121 https://theredarchive.com/post/1200121

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