It's clearly identity politics. True dough wouldn't have a pic taken of him wearing pink at some small town retro drive in classic showing a 70s pink panther movie or dressed up as the pink ladies in grease or some ****.

The issue in my interpretation of it is that there is unspoken meanings and messages in everything that everyone does all the time whether it's intentional or not and every human being is going to be susceptible to their own display of 5heir identity whether they are the prez or a nobody. To me, I don't see it as important, meaningful, or influential in any way.

I think there's bits of the critique on identity politics that are legitimate. Too much focus on (what ought to be) superficial identifying features of our personality, even if that focus is on the liberation of those with those features at the hands of oppression of the mainstream, can lead to a flattening of the concept of class struggle and a distraction away from the main injustices in our society which are all class-based. Working class and ruling class.

However, at the same time, given that the sufferers of this mainstream oppression almost always tend to be within the working class, fighting for an oppressed group of people is fighting for the working class. We should be looking to fight oppression and discrimination based on obviously spurious categories wherever we are; particularly, we should look at the machine that produces all these culture wars, of which identity politics is just one. These have been fabricated by the right who play up the idea that the act of trying to even things up and prevent exploitation is in fact victimizing those in charge, who have the right to be in charge and exploit because of accidents of birth. Class struggle is a fight against propaganda and false consciousness, and they are the primary weapon of the right in the culture wars.

It should also be noted that you can see the promise of things like full emancipation and full equal rights both de juris and de facto as potential bribes. The quite insane amount of power that has been transferred from the working classes to the ruling classes in the last century has come in part because many have been convinced not to care about class warfare, and perhaps see this power transfer as inevitable or necessary for us to have equal rights. It is a case of giving with one hand and taking with ten others.

Can't stand these nazis at a movie premiere!!!

If you are talking about the United States, the bolded isn't remotely accurate in my opinion. I could be persuaded that there is some time in the relatively recent past that the working class had more power on a relative basis than it does now, but that time most certainly was not 1923.

In general with my posts you can assume that I'm aiming them at fellow leftists / marxists. It doesn't shock me that you don't see that, because the system is designed to mask it well and distract us from the real issues, and the system is working phenomenally well.

Didn't I give you stuff by David North and Walter Benn Michaels to read critiquing identity politics (I think in North's case it was anti racism) and you called them right wing tankies?

My position is and never has been that no factions on the left or in support of identity politics are above criticism. I find no contradiction in my sometimes defending against the attackers against identity politics, and sometimes attacking those who profess identity politics above all else. The situation is nuanced and grey area enough that we should in general distrust anyone who only takes one side on the debate.

No one said any system is working phenomenally well. I am saying that the working class had much more power on a relative basis during the period from WWII to the early 1970s than it did in the roaring 20s.

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You can aim your posts at lefties and Marxists but you're in a room that has a mix of others who are going to know, for starters, that 60% of folks were below the poverty line in the 20s compared to 11% now. Maybe I'll Google labor laws back then to see what's up.

Hmm? I said the system is working phenomenally well. I'm not claiming anyone else has said that?

OK I mean I don't know the stats by heart and I could have possibly picked a different time period. In general I don't expect ever to convince anyone of the merits of my position in a place like this, or, really, in real life, and I'm very often talking into a void, or sharpening my sword, or something

It doesn't seem like you're all that convinced by the merits of your position given how little care you put into presenting them accurately.

I misread that portion of your post.

I guess I would just like you to make a claim on something and to follow it with some statistics that supports the claim - other than some cool saying like if the tree bears poisonous fruits we must burn the tree down and give the ashes to everyone for fertilizer.

I don't think it's Rococo or I or it being a "place like this" that gives you the impression of not being able to convince anyone but that it doesn't appear that you've posted much data to support some of your arguments. But I can concede that I may have missed them.

I'm not at all convinced of the merits of my position and innately distrust anyone who presents themselves as doing so

I've never been able to convince anyone of anything my entire life, it feels like, even close friends who claim they respect me. I certainly don't expect to here, dominated as it is by conservative USians. That is not my goal here. A win is not to have you go 'oh yeah OK I see what you're saying, yes, you're totally right and I agree with your list of priorities in terms of what we need to fix and how' even if that does give me a rush. A win for me is to learn. I don't feel particularly incentivized to treat this place like a debate room. As such I'm not interested nor prepared in investing sufficient time and energy into researching the economics and statistics on basically any issue and I'm very happy to place my faith in a very small number of proxies that do their own original research or repackage that of others. So I'm never really presenting my own original ideas here, or anything like that, and I'm fine with that, and if you want to dispute the ideas, that's fine, and we can talk around the subject, but I'm not academically or emotionally prepared to get into the weeds on stuff as I like macro over micro and think micro can serve as a distraction from the important stuff.

In order to be consistent with the above, I'm absolutely always prepared - delighted even - to be proven wrong, even with my most wooly assertions, which the above certainly is. I've lost count of the number of times I've believed in something and stated it confidently and then later found out not to be true, so with regards to left vs right politics, brain in a vat, gravity not being real, nothing's off the table.

Yeah that’s a big part of modern culture in the US. “I don’t know much about X, but neither does anyone else”.

Sure, but when you make claims like the people need to start seizing certain peoples businesses by force while stating that you aren't interested in researching on your own but would rather put your faith in a small number of proxies AND admitting that you've "believed in something and stated it confidently and later found out not to be true" ... it would at least be nice to see some additional sources from these proxies for these claims in order to help give some assurance that we aren't ****ing up rearranging society.

I sympathise greatly - I've made a lot of claims that must be outright shocking, and as they say, extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence and I've provided none. The issue I have is that we're working from a very different base of knowledge. The content I've consumed over the last ~3 years in particular has leftpilled the **** out of me, and realistically the best I can do if you're genuinely curious is to link you to a few of the best works that have pushed me down this path. I feel confident that if you, a reasonable, intelligent person, had access to the same content as I've had, you'd see the world more similarly to the way I currently see it than the way you currently see it. EDIT: I say that last sentence not knowing much at all about how you see the world, but in the expectation that basically the only people in this forum who have come to similar conclusions to me are Victor, Jalfrezi, and Karl OG Marx. Even most of those who identify themselves as leftists would for me count as liberal centrists.

Nobody is "outright shocked". You're just giving standard talking points we've all heard before. It's a forum, so the typical format is back and forth discussion where hen asked people usually provide justification or sources, but it is not required.

Even I'm shocked by some of the things I say. I don't believe in having a high bar for shock. If we're not easily shocked, then awful things happening more frequently becomes the new normal. I don't want ever to shrug my shoulders and say 'that's the way the world is going I guess'. I want a world in which I don't feel like my jaw is hitting the floor at things that republicans and tories say, every other day, but my jaw will continue to do so if they keep on saying those things

EDIT: also, big oof at 'standard talking points'

I'm genuinely suprised to hear you say that. You seem too smart for that to be true. Like, I could never say I never convince anyone of anything." because I convince people to do stuff all the time.

I'm not going to speculate as to why but you should be able to. clear as day.

Nothing you are saying is shocking as a random person on the internet. Most have little to no expectations on what people here will say. That people often say crazy things on the internet is the world we live in and not necessarily a bad thing

It's just stuff we've all been exposed to, it's pretty dam hard to come up with something new.

Conjecture about why I can simultaneously appear so smart and so unable to convince anyone of anything ever (it's not true, it just feels like it's true) is probably best left for therapy. Short version: I probably reek of desperation for the other person to validate my learning

Well it isn't just you, a lot of folks on the far right are getting the same sensationalized horseshit on their end. Covid really accelerated the clicks and it serves an endless platter of confirmation bias to everyone who's hungry for it. But I would assume that these "best works" that pushed you down this path would offer some nugget of validity from a scientific or economic standpoint or else it's just more of the trying to out radicalize yourself in competition with those in your inner circle for the dopemine.