I think another factor is these people have spent most of their leftist lives mostly isolated from actual “real world” leftists. If you’re a Marxist professor or writer in the 70s, who are you gonna be interacting with other than maybe other Marxist academics. When you let your views percolate in your brain (or only interacting with other egghead leftists), you end up being unable to grow and change.
Like, I really don’t think myself or most leftists who grow up in the internet will get like this when we’re in our 80s. We joke about touching grass, but the truth is being able to interact with other regular leftists from across the world on a place like Hexbear really does keep the brain worms in check, I believe.
The way vegans are treated here determined your premise is false.
I’m vegan, and things are still a million times better here (and in IRL leftist space) than it is in the real world.
The only time I've ever seen anyone argue with or about vegans is when one claims to be abused here. We put content warnings on pictures of gelatin.
I think the olds are just having a melt down over gender
Its curious, because I know more than a few olds who are utterly blaise over gender politics. Almost as though they've been living through it their entire lives. Admittedly, these tend toward LGBT olds and olds that had to wrangle over miscegenation laws.
Finkelstein, for all his virtues as a journalist, simply isn't any kind of culture warrior. I can't say I'm totally shocked that he's blind to the modern domestic civil rights era when he's been focused elsewhere. After that, he's as much a victim of the Most Propagandized Mass Media On Earth as everyone else.
It's bizarre and disgusting. What the fuck is wrong with them? Plently of people got the message back in the 70s, 80s,90s, where these assholes too busy writing sternly worded letters to Trotskyists to notice? Fuck em.
The default leftist stance should be to just let people live their fucking lives. Trans folk aren't harming anyone by being who they want to be and anyone who thinks they're doing harm needs intensive deprogramming and if that fails, gulag. I am a very chill person but I just fucking cannot deal with people who obsess over the "trans agenda" when their life has never been influenced in any way by a trans person. There's more worms than brain at that point. I was forced to work with this chud once that started talking about how much he wanted to move to Texas so I ask why and his reason was that he didn't want his kids being taught that being trans was okay. And at that point I never said another word to him and thankfully never had to work with him again. Hope he moves to Texas and dies in a mall shooting.
All self reported phenomena - pain, your favorite color or ice cream, joy, sadness, depression, colorblindless - are like that.
There's no excuse of this obsessive need to impose bourgeois gender norms. It's reaction and it's a failure to understand marxist theories of abolition the bourgeois family and apply them to what we've learned since the 1860s. Cubas new family law clearly demonstrates the correct position.
If someone has questions because they don't know what's going on, fine. But asserting that bourgeois gender roles are normal or natural or necessary is pure, indefensible reaction.
Depression would be somewhat similar but even then I think it’s a little less complex to study than transgender identity. Bridging neuroscience and complex psychological traits is just incredibly difficult.
And still, hormone replacement therapy has a dramatically better success rate at alleviating psychological distress than any antidepressant known to humankind.
There aren't biological explanations because gender is not primarily a biological phenomenon. The question "why are some people transgender?" is more correctly stated: "why do people with similar sex characteristics not conform to the same set of social norms?"
I don't know if it's as clear cut as this. I'm saying this as somebody who's had massive improvements to her mental health just days after getting on HRT, when there were no observable phenotypical changes at all that could have explained these as stress relief over my appearance being more aligned with societal gender expectations towards women. The benefits of HRT are pretty easily demonstrable, but even when you have personal lived experience with that, it's hard to say if the part of that that's not due to changes in pehnotype is because, in simplified terms, estrogen is just the only correct OS to run on my neurological hardware or if the drastically altered emotional state i'm in now allows me to more authentically live the social gender expression that i need to thrive. Because jesus fuck is that last part true for me. I couldn't exist anymore without the emotional depth i feel now. I've never been so close to other people, so able to feel for them, and that completely flipped the way i interact as a social animal. But even that can't be seperated from purely social phenomena. I had a lot of these changes already before i went on HRT, i spent more than one and a half years stripping myself of masculinity before i started HRT and i don't think these changes were lesser than the hormonal ones. It's baffling how much just wanting to be seen as a man alters behavior, and how much pressure it puts on ones' shoulders if you have to keep up the act of being a man when you actually aren't.
I'm the first to say "waitaminute" when some postmodernist entirely writes off the biological side of how men and women and anybody else interact, i know too well what a difference testosterone and estrogen make when it comes to human behavior. But at the same time, i know from personal lived experience that gender as a social construct goes so ridiculously deep that i can easily see how postmodernists arrive at that notion in the first place.
The only thing i can say for sure is that in the end, both the social and the biologcial side are much more fluid and volatile and much less set in stone than most cis people are comfortable admitting to. When people think transness is fake, they merely realize the fakeness of being cis and get scared from the fact that them being who they think they are is just something a bunch of hormones and societal norms built up, and that some barely definable part of their sense of self is the only difference between them and me.
And damn near every other human behavior. The idea that people need or deserve some kind of explanation for gender, and that they have any justification because we can't point to the gender center of the brain or the gender gland or the gender gene, is bullshit. Misogynistic, anti-feminist, reactionary bullshit.
I think this is why evo-psych attracts reactionaries. If you can determine biological bases for behavior they think it gives them some sort of justification for bigotry.
I cannot stress this enough; you cannot determine evolutionar basises for behavior. Evo psych is not science. They're making up explanations for observed behaviors after the fact that are nonfalsifiable. It is literally just rape apologia. No serious person in any field take evopsych seriously and they should never be allowed a platform.
Evopsych is fundamentally rectionary because it's entire goal is to create justification for the current state of affairs by asserting that they are the result of biological and evolutionary processes.
I cannot stress this enough; you cannot determine evolutionar basises for behavior.
Why though, isn't that something you can generally do for other species?
Evopsych is fundamentally rectionary because it’s entire goal is to create justification for the current state of affairs by asserting that they are the result of biological and evolutionary processes.
This is true in regards to the general practice of "Evolutionary Psychology" as a field of human social theory though, true.
I disagree, as I am the one good evopsych enjoyer. I am fascinated by evolutionary explanations of altruism, and I have a lot of education in evolutionary biology. I am interested in the ways that human evolution has given us the tools and the instincts to become social (damn near eusocial) animals. In the end, we have more in common with any eusocial creature than with chimps when it comes to behavior. That could be either be the result of something genotypic, but it could also be something our fancy brains have reasoned out. Either way, it's evopsych.
But I will admit, ironically there are no good places to read about this topic within "evopsych" literature. The closest is books like Unto Others (a book any champion of scientific communism ought to be familiar with), which are basically all within the larger label of evolutionary biology. So maybe evopsych is too fouled and needs ME, the one good evopsych enjoyer, to replace it.
This is like being surprised :zizek-ok: doesn't have shit, reactionary opinions, too. These people aren't Marxists just because they get one or two subjects right- Norm still ends up at the same parties of the Martha's Vineyard intelligentsia as Dershowitz no matter how many on stage tiffs they have over Israel
Ok this sucks, but honestly is whole blog is complete shit. Even the articles that could be interesting, like about Ukraine, are just short little gotchas. Sad to see anybody debase themselves for internet attention, but extra sad when it's a supposed wise old academic doing it.
God damn it. He's gonna say the "trans cult" is like Isreal because they are silencing him, isn't he...
Sigh. Great, another guy who's popular in leftist spaces who thinks people like me are some sort of nuisance for existing. :sadness-abysmal: Of course stupidpol agrees with him.
stupidpol
Comrade, for the sake of your mental health, I would suggest just not looking at that hellhole. I know it can be tempting, but i haven't looked at them in years and I consider that a definitive boon to my overall existence.
You're right. I guess sometimes I just can't resist the temptation out of morbid curiosity, but it always ends in anger and sadness. Definitely not good for my mental health. I'll follow your advice, thank you. :Care-Comrade:
Fuck you norm. You're not my comrade. Jesus fucking christ this is so easy, so low and slow across the plate. You've had fifty fucking years to pick up a godamn book and learn the most basic aspect of feminism and gender theory, so fuck you.
Yeah.
How, you might ask, is a dude who was born and raised in New York City surprised and outraged that drag exists? Because he's a fucking dinosaur. Gender was not a political issue (for him) before the fall of the Soviet Union, and his only idea for a political program is to return to the political landscape of 1968. Anything which requires him to learn anything new is experienced as a threat or a ploy by the capitalists. Useless man.
Gender was not a political issue (for him) before the fall of the Soviet Union, and his only idea for a political program is to return to the political landscape of 1968.
There's a a reason so many women who tried to join leftist orgs in the 60s and 70s ended up sticking to women's liberation orgs, and that reason is dudes like Norm. I guess it's good on him that he's called out at least one form of oppression that most libs are blind to, but normally that should mean being able to also recognize all the others instead of completely denying them because they ensure your privilege as a white cishet dude who's a credentialled part of the NYC intelligentsia.
How, you might ask, is a dude who was born and raised in New York City surprised and outraged that drag exists?
Pretty normal if you've spent all your life in Queens. Curiously enough, given the name.
This is what I meant.
Ugh the clip in that thread. Norm is blaming Angela Davis for the liberal establishment coopting her message and whitewashing it - like what the fuck else is she supposed to do, Norm? Advocate for a communist revolution which in America right now is every bit as far flung a possibility as prison abolition is? Immolate herself on the steps of the White House in protest? Stop punching left for fuck's sake and that goes for the article in the OP as well.
To listen to woke programming, you’d think the two most burning issues confronting Humanity are climate change and transgender bathrooms in North Carolina
Fucking 0 for two you dumb fucking bozo
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who is this guy?
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fucking lmao, New Yorker as hyper woke? My dad has been reading that my entire life, so I can't help but just think of him.
Finklestein is a former professor who became pretty popular on the left after he got black balled for his criticisms of Israel. Bit of a firebrand, so his speeches became popular. Honestly, this isn't super surprising, he's always been a bit of an asshole and prided himself on "not being PC"
prided himself on “not being PC”
Average True Anon guest interviewee.
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Yeah, norms brain is literally melting out of his skull from old age. Letting him share his thoughts publicly is basically irresponsible at this point.
Oh boy, he's going to become a writer for the post-split Grayzone now isn't he? :debord-tired:
I cope by just saying the books are snapshots in time and when they were written, that's the time and place where I was in agreement with them.
