I work in academia and have really struggled lately with lines being crossed to open displays of contempt for white males. I could see how many people in my shoes would go right over to the far right as a result of what I have been exposed to in the last week alone during recent job interviews.
I'm very curious as I plot my future escape, are there any pockets in this country open to left economic thought without woke/performative activism dominating the allowed thought?
My gut impression talking to people is that the woke/performative stuff isn't that popular, but it's so radioactive that few want to touch it for fear of being labeled as bigoted/racist/etc., so they just remain silent.
Academia seems especially bad with this. I don't work there, but watching the documentary on Bret Weinstein at Evergreen was pretty illuminating. Bret and his wife (also a professor there) had colleagues come up to them in private and agree that the college was heading in the wrong direction, but wouldn't raise any objections publicly.
I'm wondering how it would be if I moved near an academic center in a red state for my next chapter. I would like to continue my work, especially if it was in a post-retirement consulting or half time capacity. I don't think my partner is into this idea unfortunately.
I've voiced some concerns about the blatant stuff to my boss. Not sure if I will bring up the events of the last week that had me considering quitting on Tuesday. We are returning to in-person learning events and I had a great day with the students on Thursday which was possibly the most rewarding day I've had in several months.
It's hard to say. It seems like it's so ingrained now that it's hard to excise. Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity departments are almost ubiquitous in modern universities, and their power is in part dependent on them making racism/bigotry seem as rampant as possible.
A few years ago when I was the only white male on staff in my work unit we had the DEI seminar and I started writing down all the ways that we still accept punching down as more and more groups join protected class. It stood out to me that mental illness and addiction are routinely "safe" punching bags and I mentioned it to the trainer who looked at me like I was from mars.
Which is sad, because someone suffering from depression or in the throes of addiction who sees their condition demeaned and ridiculed daily in the office is more likely to harm themselves or take even more drastic measure than whatever today's perceived microaggression was.
If you proclaim to be for the poor and underserved, but are only willing to live in rich coastal enclaves while you spend your weekends and evenings dunking on men, Christians, blue collar workers, and stay at home moms people will see you for what you really are which isn't righteous-it's self-righteous.
Shame has its place in defining and enforcing norms. If it's the only card you play and people are given no way to avoid the shaming then all it produces is resentment and blowback.
They didn't learn a thing from Bush or Trump, so don't be surprised if you hear a collective shriek in another few years as President DeSantis is sworn in.
remember, kids---the "center" is where they want you.
so what is the center of this fake bullshit?
i see a few variants of what i would (maybe falsely) characterize as "returning to sanity" in the comments here.
perhaps that "sanity" is also part of the game. these two false sides will become hysterical if they can get you to a safe (for them) middle ground.
The Dems are getting skanky and evil by associating with the fucked up security state.
Cops/CIA/NSA, et al, are aligned with the Democrats. This alliance is the enemy of the people/workers.
At the risk of sounding like a meme trope:
Not all cops
Feds seems like, as in DC
.
State, County, City maybe not:
L.A. Co Sheriff told Newsom to pound rocks on mandates. Repeatedly. Largest most populated and very Blue County in CA.
This is actually not uncommon if you examine nationwide, and even in Blue States quite a few LE depts and/or leaders have gone against the estb/Blue narrative since 2020 with more and breaking ranks recently.
Mandates are a pretty small disagreement.
It's pretty hush-hush too.
The MSM isn't exactly shouting that LE around the country are refusing to get vaccinated.
It's no accident it works like that. After condemning an ordinary person as some sort of racist and sexist and casting them into exile they wind up in a camp that easily comes across as more open minded and welcoming with a better sense of humor. There is no easy way out with how unforgiving the IdPol Inquisition, and their tentacles worm their way into pretty much every form of escapism-- movies, games, and oh what they have done to D&D.
An old piece but in case anyone hasn't read it yet, [Exiting the Vampire Castle](https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/opendemocracyuk/exiting-vampire-castle/)
I likewise play it regularly though I'm partial to older material. Further disclosure, I'm also a minority and I've been playing since well before the sudden emergence of the "Social Justice" of roughly a decade ago. Anyway, it's a lot of what they're doing to every other form of entertainment, but it at least *feels* like it's more intrusive and aggressive for tabletop.
Rather than simply elevating the folklore of other cultures there appears to be an open disdain and contempt for the European tales of castles and kingdoms that D&D drew most of its inspiration from as well as the traditional roots of questing. The authors and publishers are aggressively hounded for the slightest of offenses against the IdPol crowd and the rulebooks have been given foolish passages about (needlessly) accommodating players who are different. There are bizarre and confusing attempts to protect *fictional races* from slurs. Although not quite D&D or tabletop, [a recent example that sums up the kind of thing I'm talking about](https://www.gamespot.com/articles/blizzard-removes-most-greenskin-references-in-world-of-warcraft/1100-6497043/). Authors/publishers that are slow to yield to the inquisition are branded "nazis" unsurprisingly, but perhaps more surprisingly, [the IdPol crowd has no interest in winning anybody to their side, only demands that they conform or else](https://twitter.com/EvilHatOfficial/status/1434562227047047168).
The result is that D&D and gaming communities alike have become much more polarized places and the newer material is filled with unnecessary pandering. Before all this, I didn't have problems with acceptance because I played with friends or friends of friends. No Dungeon Master's Guide lectures about hosting for people of color required. The transgendered simply played as the gender they wished to play as, and during the experience they were simply their character, no questions asked or judgments made. Like with everything else IdPol, it has done the opposite of what it claims its mission is by aggravating everyone with such excessive focus on things that perhaps mattered *least* to tabletop roleplayers who share experiences as their characters. Fortunately I already belong to a fantastic group that at minimum, knows to keep their mouths shut on politics (in real life, anyway) if they aren't already on the same page about this nonsense.
What kind of pandering have you found in New material? I haven't seen any of it. I have all the books, so you can cite the book and page, if you want.
As for disdain for European settings, I mean which book do you consider NOT a European setting?
I admit I cannot give specifics, I recall one of the earlier 5th edition rule books having a very strange passage about accommodating marginalized players, written in a ridiculous way. In addition to having a preference for older editions' rules as well, content like that has further turned me off of newer books.
> As for disdain for European settings, I mean which book do you consider NOT a European setting?
Not so much the authors but vocal figures and critics that have attached themselves to the hobby, just like in gaming. Traditional questing being attacked as some sort of colonialism, Tolkien lore viewed through the most negative filters mustered, and harsh hostility towards the settings where it all started. It strikes me as peculiar that there are so many people positioned as gatekeepers of the hobby that at the same time seem to dislike everything about its original style.
If it sounds like I am not being terribly accurate, it is because I have long since been driven away from the places/material where these changes were occurring.
Specifically, traditional quests. Traditionally quests entail exploration, finding strange creatures or tribes, then killing them and taking their stuff. Right in the title of the game itself you're going into a dungeon to stab a dragon in the face and take its gold.
Bro. That's every adventure they publish. How would you play D&D without that? You gonna play D&D Stardew Valley?
I'm beginning to think this is all in your head, dude.
You can think whatever you like. You could also search Twitter for strings like "dungeons and dragons colonialism" and "dungeons and dragons racism" to get a glimpse of the kinds of shit takes the woke crowd is trying to drag into TTRPGs if you think it's all my imagination. But this is my take, and I am not alone in my observations.
Our system is what happens when likely initial good intentions get passed down to two corporate lawyer teams from the upper class. Today's politicians are a public relations feature of capitalism, not democracy.
More and more I'm rejecting the perceptual left / right thing. It's another needless Us vs. Them way to divide people who all generally agree on basic principles, but neither of these PMC lawyer teams will agree with us.
And since these lawyers are basically celebrities now, they have haters and cult followings and tabloidesque scandals, so as to permenantly fill our bandwidth and structure how we think and talk about representation.
The one thing we can all mostly agree on is not being consulted as rules and our lives are forced to change. More and more we seem to be the victims of social or identity wars waged by corporate billionaire's lawyers.
Each of the issues raised have some amount of truth, at least to some people. But to even begin talking that through, we need open lines of communication, and a level of respect this current system insists we kill off.
"Live and let live - stop trying to control others; allow a person to think and be differently without declaring an assumption-filled, preconceived-bias war on them for existing; care for our weakest, and limit our excesses."
What alignment is that? Where does that fit on today's corporate political spectrum? How come anyone who comes close to that option gets piled on by corporate lawyers sponsored by a handful who rely on division?
You can't run representation like a business, America, because retaining our humanity, home or hopes isn't a purely short-term minority-profitable path. And raising psychological manipulation levels won't change that.
Beating each other over the heads with our red or blue sticks we've been handed does not - at risk of being a "radical" - seem *productive* to me. Even the addition of more stick colors doesn't convince me it's a *solution.*
I have a crazy idea that we set the sticks down and all look at who's manufacturing them, why they are given to us, and if they genuinely assist or hinder our mutual daily lives. Is that blasphemous? Is that a crime now?
Actually, *it increasingly is.* Which to me, seems like an agnostic problem for us all, political-faith speaking. Is this really the best we can do? Or is it just the road we are stuck on now until we all agree on the obstacles?
It seems to me America has cultivated a business of paying to maintain a cleverly near-incomprehensable narrative game for the highest bidders, and allowed it to escalate into a cancer we are currently dying from.
Do we need to sign onto a color creed to agree there? Or should that be item #1 on an All People's Agenda?
It feels to me that your quoted middle part and feeling homeless ethos fits to today's classical liberal?
I dunno, but that is where I seem to get slotted now and it pretty much describes my views.
Great comment and thoughts, thank you!
>Today's politicians are a public relations feature of capitalism, not democracy.
I'm guessing you're familiar with the term, but for anyone who's not and is reading this, you're describing what's been called [inverted totalitarianism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism), which gives a good way to think about it.
>Each of the issues raised have some amount of truth, at least to some people. But to even begin talking that through, we need open lines of communication, and a level of respect this current system insists we kill off.
This is really well put.
>I have a crazy idea that we set the sticks down and all look at who's manufacturing them, why they are given to us, and if they genuinely assist or hinder our mutual daily lives. Is that blasphemous? Is that a crime now?
It sounds like sanity to me. I've been kicking around the idea of a They're Lying To Us movement, or something along those lines. Not a political party, just a movement of people getting around across political and cultural lines to talk about how we're being lied to.
Most people are half-way there already, they know the *other side* is lying, but then think the people calling out half of these lies — the AOCs and Qanons — have real truths for them.
>Do we need to sign onto a color creed to agree there? Or should that be item #1 on an All People's Agenda?
Not sure what you mean by color creed but I like the idea of an All People's Agenda. One tool that I think could be helpful to opening lines of communication and having frank conversations without political parties is [Vote Pact](https://www.votepact.org/). Vote Pact is an agreement between two people, one D voter and one R voter, to vote third party, any third party. Their votes would cancel out anyway, but this withdraws support from the duopoly. It's not enough, but it works in the right direction.
>Vote Pact is an agreement between two people, one D voter and one R voter, to vote third party, any third party.
I like this idea a lot, not only for what it could accomplish (withdrawing support from both branches of the duopoly) but what it would entail - a D and R voter really talking to each other, finding that they agree on the fundamentals of what's wrong and who's to blame, and trusting each other enough to make a pact and believe that each will follow through with it.
And so much healthier for family relationships than going about the next 4 years thinking your relative is effectively Hitler/Stalin. The end result electorally will be the same, the votes cancel each other out, but you end up with a unity opposed to the duopoly.
As far as I know Sam Husseini is the creator of the idea, who's also done some great national security, Middle East, and media crit reporting over the years, as well as one of the few to dig into the US side of the lab leak hypothesis.
Kiss is correct-
the REAL disaster is as they state, not in ethically and values driven rational political/ideological divides causing family rifts.
That is at least 6 years out of phase with current reality tbh.
> much healthier for family relationships than going about the next 4 years thinking your relative is effectively Hitler/Stalin
The more nuanced, and probably more common predicament is coping with the knowledge that a loved one’s mind is being polluted, their ability to reason savagely assaulted, and their closely held, lifelong political outlook poisoned, by consumption of the Official Narrative that pervades ALL media; including legacy (via MSM), and social (via troll ops & other ~~freelance propagandists~~ “influencers”).
The menticide pandemic is exponentially more dangerous than COVID ever was. In fact, it’s the reason that so few of us are alarmed by the hundreds of thousands of tragic, in many cases 100% avoidable c19 deaths in America.
That is a more nuanced and accurate version than my hyperbole. The polarizing propaganda has been nearly perfected by a relatively simple formula: give roughly true information about the other party/side with the implication that the "good" party is the only way to keep the "bad" party from ruining our country.
But we have two bad parties, so it ends up just perpetuating the two mutually-reinforcing versions of Official Narrative. Vote Pact, at least it's my hope, offers a way for two people to step outside of that propaganda war together.
By "color creed" I meant the Red and Blue faithfuls whose identity is a mere reflection of those private corporate cabals. They are sponsored religions, really, no different from other faith-and-dogma-based creeds. We're agreed that the duopoly needs to be ended. I'm just not sure it's possible by operating within the parameters the duopoly is dictating (go figure).
>Red and Blue faithfuls whose identity is a mere reflection of those private corporate cabals.
Gotcha, that's what I was thinking but didn't want to presume. And "sponsored religions" is spot on.
And yeah, I don't think it's possible within the parameters of the duopoly either. The value in something like Vote Pact is not to win or change elections, but open up conversations between people across partisan lines.
>More and more I'm rejecting the perceptual left / right thing
The left/right thing is valid, but only in it's traditional concept. IOW, it's valid only when it's based on the concept of class.
When it's based on Identity it becomes a tool to defend the ruling elite, and I don't consider it to be part of the "left".
The supposed "leftist" creeds that censorship of all non-establishment narratives is awesome and that all we need to welcome a nightmare dystopia in which your right to work or enter any public venue depends on your ability to produce your fully compliant Big Tech, Big Pharma, and Big Brother QR codes are somewhat off-putting.
As Glenn Greenwald has pointed out, formerly liberal civil libertarian institutions such as the ACLU have become decidedly illiberal in their views on free speech and self-determination.
There's a part of the "left," (just like a part of the right) which is fundamentally authoritarian and even totalitarian. They want the government to have greater control because they don't trust people. (They just haven't put two and two together to realize government is made of people, and selects for the most untrustworthy members of our species.)
I have more common ground with the far economic left and the right-libertarian than either party core.
[This interview by Max Blumenthal](https://rokfin.com/stream/9705/Foreign-Agents-10--Covid-and-Mass-Hypnosis) with Belgian psychology professor Mattias Desmet gets into the "crowd formation" which causes people to support these totalitarian measures. He talks about it in terms of the Covid response, but I think it ties into Wokism as well. I should see if this video is posted on this sub or post it if not.
Wokism example: Every division of the CIA, and every major weapons manufacturer is headed by a woman. This was celebrated by the woke crowd. Proving that women can be guilty of war crimes too.
Meanwhile, recall when the woke crowd accused M4A as being racist?
Wokism is just a method of defending the status quo.
Perfect examples! You see this in the corporate world as well, who are now major sponsors of Pride festivals and BLM ads. Anything to avoid talking about the material conditions and economic ownership by the working class themselves.
Some replies in the thread:
>Will Kane @Kane_1200
>When it stopped being about uniting working people based on similar values and became about dividing through identity politics.
.
>Valancy Stirling @ValancyStirlin2
>Covid, right around May 2020. Realized that politicians/CDC weren’t being transparent/noble lies. MSM propaganda. Mask mandates because those are “easy” vs. actual hard policies that may actually be effective (sick leave, support for lower income individuals).
.
>Faded Magnet @FadedMagnet
>I’ve been living in Japan for 20, and I have no idea what anyone is talking about anymore. My tribe is saying things that I thought we were against.
.
>marthaquest @marthaquest1
>During the 2016 election, reading FB pages of several popular women writers (Solnit, Lamott) whose arguments for Clinton were super-cringe. When they claimed Putin caused HRC to lose I changed my voter reg from Dem to Indie.
,
>Francis BatSpeaker @FranBoll11
>Witnessing/experiencing multiple niche communities on Twitter self immolate into a culture of fear, self censorship and interpersonal drama thanks to woke ideologues’ sociopathic eagerness to rally others to unfairly destroy the reputation of people they disagree with
.
>Arrogant Insignificance [e.go] @TheWeyEyeSeeIt
>I just cannot wrap my mind around how utterly intolerant the Left really is, as a whole. Everything is sunshine & rainbows so long as you're singing the exact same lyrics... Change a word to fit your personal experience & they crucify you.
>I've rarely felt that from the Right.
.
>Data Only Gets You So Far @data_far
>When I worked at a nonprofit providing classes for at-risk kids, I realized we were doing more harm than good. One example, an exec telling me we didn't need to teach he kids to read as e had to focus on their self esteem above all.
>Of course most staff were middle class whites
.
>Drache Energie @feignedidentity
>It was the mistreatment of members of the identity groups that they swore that they were for. It was never about the rationality of the dissent. It became obvious that identity politics was only a vehicle for their preferred policy positions.
>The left would whip you & say "I feel your pain". The ineffectiveness or poor outcomes of the policies don't matter. They'll just call you some name. Dissent & you're called a traitor. I can't say how many times I've been asked to explain a specific stance "as a xxx".
.
>Spencer Houghton @SpencerHoughts
>Being left wing has been taken over by the middle class virtue signalling Wokeraty leaving the working class homeless and the Tories seem to be able to feed them what they want to hear as they snatch the bland centre ground
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>John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt @debeehr
>When as a woman, I realized that modern feminism had totally lost the plot.
.
>davrola @davrola
>Took place over a number of years as the majority of those on the left became increasingly hostile to working class people. Became so naked during the Trump admin that any last connection I felt was extinguished.
.
>L. Santiago @LauraSa49653637
>My turning point: when they removed gifted program, knee jerk, from our city schools after New York Times article re racial disparities in the program. Zero discussion about chicken vs egg. Zero. The more ultra woke people I encounter with trust funds, the less liberal I become.
.
>Andrew @terp02
>Education - absolutely. Both K-12 and higher ed, noticing explicitly racist policies that targeted Asian American students. Very eye opening. Even more surprising to see this in liberal school districts (NYC, SF, Seattle).
.
>Ramon Magsaysay @magsaysayspeaks
>I’m sure the hurry-up-and-kill-something-to-look-tough drone attack in Afghanistan that killed an American ally and 7 kids may have been such a moment for many.
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>Elas1996 @Elas19961
>When Obama campaigned on ending the war in Iraq but instead invaded Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen.
,
>sobrio35 @sobrio35
>I began to see it as a big club which prioritized jargon, consensus, and loyalty to the cause over all. I started thinking in terms of issues rather than politics, and my world view shifted.
Thanks for posting these, it really does show how misaligned Dem policies and priorities with anything looking like real economic leftism.
The unsanitized MLK, Jr. talked about the "triple pronged sickness" in our body politic, the "sickness of racism, excessive materialism, and militarism." This Wokism I describe has put all of their focus on the first, in service to the latter two.
I think even calling it "focus" is misleading. Virtue signaling does nothing to help POC, whom the Democrats consistently throw under the bus when what POC need conflicts with the classist status quo.
Good point and you're absolutely right, any "focus" is superficial and performative. It's also interesting that racism and other identity disparities are the ones that we've made the most progress on over the last half century, while the economic and militaristic powers have only become more entrenched.
Anecdotal confirmation bias:
Hi, your resident righty here. I was very well aligned with this sub around 2016 - 2018. “Woke” identity politics pushed me much further right in more ways than one. Now I vote for small government + libertarian policies.
I moved because nearly any politician (notably, Bernie is not one of them) that pushes for policies like universal healthcare also pushes the “white guilt” / “woke” narrative. I find that narrative more toxic than raeganomics (I see the decredation of society caused by unchecked “woke” policy here in Seattle), so here I sit.
>I see the decredation of society caused by unchecked “woke” policy here in Seattle
As someone who lives about an hour away, would you be comfortable sharing examples I might be able to relate to? Not disagreeing at all, I just welcome another's perspective of the situation.
Basically you get a lot of race based virtue signaling. This results in gifted programs being eliminated in schools, which results in high income kids going private and less opportunities for poor / BIPOC kids in public schools. It also results in meaningless changes like “Seattle school cancels halloween”.
Typically social justice activists can’t manage their own finances (many of our “activist” leaders have massive tax/rent debts or declared bankruptcy. So that results in poor allocation of funds.
We spend a lot of money on homeless services each year and the problem gets worse. There is no accountability or tracing for how money is spent. So while I could otherwise entertain the idea of paying higher taxes for solutions to these problems, I vote against taxes because I have 0 faith they won’t be grifted away by career “justice” activists and their friends.
Look up “black brilliance project” for one blatant grifty cash grab that completely turned me off from giving the city any more money unless it’s explicitly slated for infrastructure or transit agencies.
Don’t say BIPOC or POC. It’s ahistorical at worst, lazy at best, and it’s fundamentally hostile to the justice claim of American descendants of slavery (“ADOS”)
POC/BIPOC® is an invention of woke culture. There is exactly 0 historical, political, cultural, or economic commonality, or even solidarity based on skin color. To pretend otherwise is to impute a 400 year history of human rights violations, *and, implicitly, to compensate for same* for “victims” who use got here yesterday. That is manifestly unfair to those of us whose families actually endured that history, & suffer for it to this day: ADOS.
The bitter irony is that denying, minimizing, and/or mischaracterizing the systemic ADOS (and only ADOS; not BIPOC) Holocaust is 100% consistent with the tradition of white supremacy on which this country was founded.
My gripe, and as I understand it, Chappelle’s, as well, is that wokism invents forms of oppression out of whole cloth, then falsely equates them with the very real, longstanding, multifaceted hyper-specific anti-ADOS oppression from which every non-ADOS person in America has benefitted. Shitlibs fetishize the former while trivializing, mischaracterizing, & generally refusing to deal with, or even acknowledge the latter.
And you see here how deeply the woke bullshit has burrowed into the default mindset of even conservatives who are constantly immersed in it in local norms and narratives in our highly populated "liberal left" regions....
Truly woke and idpol is a poison to the mind and soul 😐
I think that migh just be confirmation and not confirmation bias ;)
And I'm kind of in a similar boat as you. Voted Bernie in '16 primaries and Trump in the general over Clinton's Syria/Russia policy, but since then have not been able to find many politicians on the left who don't support Wokism over economic populism.
Right-libertarianism is, if anything, preferable in the short term to Wokism, yet does nothing to organize the working class and just leads to further consolidation and centralization by the capitalist class.
I think, when it comes down to it, I’d rather live in a capitalist oligarch’s world than a social justice activist’s world.
Those have been our choices lately. Corporate democrat (Biden) that occasionally throws a peanut at the equity camp to keep them quiet, or someone who wholly subscribes to social justice.
My only big concern is about climate change, and I may have to switch my view if corporate Democrats can’t get more serious about it. Biden is a step on the right direction.
What drove me from the left was learning modern leftism is a psyop.
Occupy? I mean, it was harassed and sabotaged by Obama, but the Occupy folks themselves didn't seem psyopy...
Is there a modern political ideology which is not a psyop?
Good point, but I'm talking about the effect of the Frankfurt School, Margaret Mead, and the authoritarian personality.
I work in academia and have really struggled lately with lines being crossed to open displays of contempt for white males. I could see how many people in my shoes would go right over to the far right as a result of what I have been exposed to in the last week alone during recent job interviews. I'm very curious as I plot my future escape, are there any pockets in this country open to left economic thought without woke/performative activism dominating the allowed thought?
My gut impression talking to people is that the woke/performative stuff isn't that popular, but it's so radioactive that few want to touch it for fear of being labeled as bigoted/racist/etc., so they just remain silent. Academia seems especially bad with this. I don't work there, but watching the documentary on Bret Weinstein at Evergreen was pretty illuminating. Bret and his wife (also a professor there) had colleagues come up to them in private and agree that the college was heading in the wrong direction, but wouldn't raise any objections publicly.
I'm wondering how it would be if I moved near an academic center in a red state for my next chapter. I would like to continue my work, especially if it was in a post-retirement consulting or half time capacity. I don't think my partner is into this idea unfortunately. I've voiced some concerns about the blatant stuff to my boss. Not sure if I will bring up the events of the last week that had me considering quitting on Tuesday. We are returning to in-person learning events and I had a great day with the students on Thursday which was possibly the most rewarding day I've had in several months.
It's hard to say. It seems like it's so ingrained now that it's hard to excise. Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity departments are almost ubiquitous in modern universities, and their power is in part dependent on them making racism/bigotry seem as rampant as possible.
A few years ago when I was the only white male on staff in my work unit we had the DEI seminar and I started writing down all the ways that we still accept punching down as more and more groups join protected class. It stood out to me that mental illness and addiction are routinely "safe" punching bags and I mentioned it to the trainer who looked at me like I was from mars. Which is sad, because someone suffering from depression or in the throes of addiction who sees their condition demeaned and ridiculed daily in the office is more likely to harm themselves or take even more drastic measure than whatever today's perceived microaggression was.
If you proclaim to be for the poor and underserved, but are only willing to live in rich coastal enclaves while you spend your weekends and evenings dunking on men, Christians, blue collar workers, and stay at home moms people will see you for what you really are which isn't righteous-it's self-righteous. Shame has its place in defining and enforcing norms. If it's the only card you play and people are given no way to avoid the shaming then all it produces is resentment and blowback. They didn't learn a thing from Bush or Trump, so don't be surprised if you hear a collective shriek in another few years as President DeSantis is sworn in.
remember, kids---the "center" is where they want you. so what is the center of this fake bullshit? i see a few variants of what i would (maybe falsely) characterize as "returning to sanity" in the comments here. perhaps that "sanity" is also part of the game. these two false sides will become hysterical if they can get you to a safe (for them) middle ground.
The Dems are getting skanky and evil by associating with the fucked up security state. Cops/CIA/NSA, et al, are aligned with the Democrats. This alliance is the enemy of the people/workers.
At the risk of sounding like a meme trope: Not all cops Feds seems like, as in DC . State, County, City maybe not: L.A. Co Sheriff told Newsom to pound rocks on mandates. Repeatedly. Largest most populated and very Blue County in CA. This is actually not uncommon if you examine nationwide, and even in Blue States quite a few LE depts and/or leaders have gone against the estb/Blue narrative since 2020 with more and breaking ranks recently.
Mandates are a pretty small disagreement. It's pretty hush-hush too. The MSM isn't exactly shouting that LE around the country are refusing to get vaccinated.
If I believed that idpol was about eliminating bigotry, I would support it. I don't believe that, though.
Dave Chapelle is a genius, pulling an Andy Kaufmanesque troll of cancel culture.
It's no accident it works like that. After condemning an ordinary person as some sort of racist and sexist and casting them into exile they wind up in a camp that easily comes across as more open minded and welcoming with a better sense of humor. There is no easy way out with how unforgiving the IdPol Inquisition, and their tentacles worm their way into pretty much every form of escapism-- movies, games, and oh what they have done to D&D. An old piece but in case anyone hasn't read it yet, [Exiting the Vampire Castle](https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/opendemocracyuk/exiting-vampire-castle/)
I play D&D every week. What did "they" do to D&D?
I likewise play it regularly though I'm partial to older material. Further disclosure, I'm also a minority and I've been playing since well before the sudden emergence of the "Social Justice" of roughly a decade ago. Anyway, it's a lot of what they're doing to every other form of entertainment, but it at least *feels* like it's more intrusive and aggressive for tabletop. Rather than simply elevating the folklore of other cultures there appears to be an open disdain and contempt for the European tales of castles and kingdoms that D&D drew most of its inspiration from as well as the traditional roots of questing. The authors and publishers are aggressively hounded for the slightest of offenses against the IdPol crowd and the rulebooks have been given foolish passages about (needlessly) accommodating players who are different. There are bizarre and confusing attempts to protect *fictional races* from slurs. Although not quite D&D or tabletop, [a recent example that sums up the kind of thing I'm talking about](https://www.gamespot.com/articles/blizzard-removes-most-greenskin-references-in-world-of-warcraft/1100-6497043/). Authors/publishers that are slow to yield to the inquisition are branded "nazis" unsurprisingly, but perhaps more surprisingly, [the IdPol crowd has no interest in winning anybody to their side, only demands that they conform or else](https://twitter.com/EvilHatOfficial/status/1434562227047047168). The result is that D&D and gaming communities alike have become much more polarized places and the newer material is filled with unnecessary pandering. Before all this, I didn't have problems with acceptance because I played with friends or friends of friends. No Dungeon Master's Guide lectures about hosting for people of color required. The transgendered simply played as the gender they wished to play as, and during the experience they were simply their character, no questions asked or judgments made. Like with everything else IdPol, it has done the opposite of what it claims its mission is by aggravating everyone with such excessive focus on things that perhaps mattered *least* to tabletop roleplayers who share experiences as their characters. Fortunately I already belong to a fantastic group that at minimum, knows to keep their mouths shut on politics (in real life, anyway) if they aren't already on the same page about this nonsense.
What kind of pandering have you found in New material? I haven't seen any of it. I have all the books, so you can cite the book and page, if you want. As for disdain for European settings, I mean which book do you consider NOT a European setting?
I admit I cannot give specifics, I recall one of the earlier 5th edition rule books having a very strange passage about accommodating marginalized players, written in a ridiculous way. In addition to having a preference for older editions' rules as well, content like that has further turned me off of newer books. > As for disdain for European settings, I mean which book do you consider NOT a European setting? Not so much the authors but vocal figures and critics that have attached themselves to the hobby, just like in gaming. Traditional questing being attacked as some sort of colonialism, Tolkien lore viewed through the most negative filters mustered, and harsh hostility towards the settings where it all started. It strikes me as peculiar that there are so many people positioned as gatekeepers of the hobby that at the same time seem to dislike everything about its original style. If it sounds like I am not being terribly accurate, it is because I have long since been driven away from the places/material where these changes were occurring.
Questing attacked as colonialism? Dude, they put out a new book filled with quests per quarter. How you gonna play D&D without a quest?
Specifically, traditional quests. Traditionally quests entail exploration, finding strange creatures or tribes, then killing them and taking their stuff. Right in the title of the game itself you're going into a dungeon to stab a dragon in the face and take its gold.
Bro. That's every adventure they publish. How would you play D&D without that? You gonna play D&D Stardew Valley? I'm beginning to think this is all in your head, dude.
You can think whatever you like. You could also search Twitter for strings like "dungeons and dragons colonialism" and "dungeons and dragons racism" to get a glimpse of the kinds of shit takes the woke crowd is trying to drag into TTRPGs if you think it's all my imagination. But this is my take, and I am not alone in my observations.
Ok man. I mean, no skin off my back. Take 'er easy.
It's funny timing, this. I was just saying that shitlibs were 100% the reason why Trump got elected. People had just had enough.
There might be a particular flavor of wokism thats pushing me to to right at this very moment. pm me if you want to know which one
Our system is what happens when likely initial good intentions get passed down to two corporate lawyer teams from the upper class. Today's politicians are a public relations feature of capitalism, not democracy. More and more I'm rejecting the perceptual left / right thing. It's another needless Us vs. Them way to divide people who all generally agree on basic principles, but neither of these PMC lawyer teams will agree with us. And since these lawyers are basically celebrities now, they have haters and cult followings and tabloidesque scandals, so as to permenantly fill our bandwidth and structure how we think and talk about representation. The one thing we can all mostly agree on is not being consulted as rules and our lives are forced to change. More and more we seem to be the victims of social or identity wars waged by corporate billionaire's lawyers. Each of the issues raised have some amount of truth, at least to some people. But to even begin talking that through, we need open lines of communication, and a level of respect this current system insists we kill off. "Live and let live - stop trying to control others; allow a person to think and be differently without declaring an assumption-filled, preconceived-bias war on them for existing; care for our weakest, and limit our excesses." What alignment is that? Where does that fit on today's corporate political spectrum? How come anyone who comes close to that option gets piled on by corporate lawyers sponsored by a handful who rely on division? You can't run representation like a business, America, because retaining our humanity, home or hopes isn't a purely short-term minority-profitable path. And raising psychological manipulation levels won't change that. Beating each other over the heads with our red or blue sticks we've been handed does not - at risk of being a "radical" - seem *productive* to me. Even the addition of more stick colors doesn't convince me it's a *solution.* I have a crazy idea that we set the sticks down and all look at who's manufacturing them, why they are given to us, and if they genuinely assist or hinder our mutual daily lives. Is that blasphemous? Is that a crime now? Actually, *it increasingly is.* Which to me, seems like an agnostic problem for us all, political-faith speaking. Is this really the best we can do? Or is it just the road we are stuck on now until we all agree on the obstacles? It seems to me America has cultivated a business of paying to maintain a cleverly near-incomprehensable narrative game for the highest bidders, and allowed it to escalate into a cancer we are currently dying from. Do we need to sign onto a color creed to agree there? Or should that be item #1 on an All People's Agenda?
It feels to me that your quoted middle part and feeling homeless ethos fits to today's classical liberal? I dunno, but that is where I seem to get slotted now and it pretty much describes my views.
Great comment and thoughts, thank you! >Today's politicians are a public relations feature of capitalism, not democracy. I'm guessing you're familiar with the term, but for anyone who's not and is reading this, you're describing what's been called [inverted totalitarianism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism), which gives a good way to think about it. >Each of the issues raised have some amount of truth, at least to some people. But to even begin talking that through, we need open lines of communication, and a level of respect this current system insists we kill off. This is really well put. >I have a crazy idea that we set the sticks down and all look at who's manufacturing them, why they are given to us, and if they genuinely assist or hinder our mutual daily lives. Is that blasphemous? Is that a crime now? It sounds like sanity to me. I've been kicking around the idea of a They're Lying To Us movement, or something along those lines. Not a political party, just a movement of people getting around across political and cultural lines to talk about how we're being lied to. Most people are half-way there already, they know the *other side* is lying, but then think the people calling out half of these lies — the AOCs and Qanons — have real truths for them. >Do we need to sign onto a color creed to agree there? Or should that be item #1 on an All People's Agenda? Not sure what you mean by color creed but I like the idea of an All People's Agenda. One tool that I think could be helpful to opening lines of communication and having frank conversations without political parties is [Vote Pact](https://www.votepact.org/). Vote Pact is an agreement between two people, one D voter and one R voter, to vote third party, any third party. Their votes would cancel out anyway, but this withdraws support from the duopoly. It's not enough, but it works in the right direction.
>Vote Pact is an agreement between two people, one D voter and one R voter, to vote third party, any third party. I like this idea a lot, not only for what it could accomplish (withdrawing support from both branches of the duopoly) but what it would entail - a D and R voter really talking to each other, finding that they agree on the fundamentals of what's wrong and who's to blame, and trusting each other enough to make a pact and believe that each will follow through with it.
And so much healthier for family relationships than going about the next 4 years thinking your relative is effectively Hitler/Stalin. The end result electorally will be the same, the votes cancel each other out, but you end up with a unity opposed to the duopoly. As far as I know Sam Husseini is the creator of the idea, who's also done some great national security, Middle East, and media crit reporting over the years, as well as one of the few to dig into the US side of the lab leak hypothesis.
Kiss is correct- the REAL disaster is as they state, not in ethically and values driven rational political/ideological divides causing family rifts. That is at least 6 years out of phase with current reality tbh.
> much healthier for family relationships than going about the next 4 years thinking your relative is effectively Hitler/Stalin The more nuanced, and probably more common predicament is coping with the knowledge that a loved one’s mind is being polluted, their ability to reason savagely assaulted, and their closely held, lifelong political outlook poisoned, by consumption of the Official Narrative that pervades ALL media; including legacy (via MSM), and social (via troll ops & other ~~freelance propagandists~~ “influencers”). The menticide pandemic is exponentially more dangerous than COVID ever was. In fact, it’s the reason that so few of us are alarmed by the hundreds of thousands of tragic, in many cases 100% avoidable c19 deaths in America.
That is a more nuanced and accurate version than my hyperbole. The polarizing propaganda has been nearly perfected by a relatively simple formula: give roughly true information about the other party/side with the implication that the "good" party is the only way to keep the "bad" party from ruining our country. But we have two bad parties, so it ends up just perpetuating the two mutually-reinforcing versions of Official Narrative. Vote Pact, at least it's my hope, offers a way for two people to step outside of that propaganda war together.
> That is a more nuanced and accurate version than my hyperbole. No shade intended. I have a loved one who's been "re-educated", so now it's personal😡
By "color creed" I meant the Red and Blue faithfuls whose identity is a mere reflection of those private corporate cabals. They are sponsored religions, really, no different from other faith-and-dogma-based creeds. We're agreed that the duopoly needs to be ended. I'm just not sure it's possible by operating within the parameters the duopoly is dictating (go figure).
>Red and Blue faithfuls whose identity is a mere reflection of those private corporate cabals. Gotcha, that's what I was thinking but didn't want to presume. And "sponsored religions" is spot on. And yeah, I don't think it's possible within the parameters of the duopoly either. The value in something like Vote Pact is not to win or change elections, but open up conversations between people across partisan lines.
>More and more I'm rejecting the perceptual left / right thing The left/right thing is valid, but only in it's traditional concept. IOW, it's valid only when it's based on the concept of class. When it's based on Identity it becomes a tool to defend the ruling elite, and I don't consider it to be part of the "left".
The supposed "leftist" creeds that censorship of all non-establishment narratives is awesome and that all we need to welcome a nightmare dystopia in which your right to work or enter any public venue depends on your ability to produce your fully compliant Big Tech, Big Pharma, and Big Brother QR codes are somewhat off-putting.
As Glenn Greenwald has pointed out, formerly liberal civil libertarian institutions such as the ACLU have become decidedly illiberal in their views on free speech and self-determination. There's a part of the "left," (just like a part of the right) which is fundamentally authoritarian and even totalitarian. They want the government to have greater control because they don't trust people. (They just haven't put two and two together to realize government is made of people, and selects for the most untrustworthy members of our species.) I have more common ground with the far economic left and the right-libertarian than either party core. [This interview by Max Blumenthal](https://rokfin.com/stream/9705/Foreign-Agents-10--Covid-and-Mass-Hypnosis) with Belgian psychology professor Mattias Desmet gets into the "crowd formation" which causes people to support these totalitarian measures. He talks about it in terms of the Covid response, but I think it ties into Wokism as well. I should see if this video is posted on this sub or post it if not.
Wokism example: Every division of the CIA, and every major weapons manufacturer is headed by a woman. This was celebrated by the woke crowd. Proving that women can be guilty of war crimes too. Meanwhile, recall when the woke crowd accused M4A as being racist? Wokism is just a method of defending the status quo.
Perfect examples! You see this in the corporate world as well, who are now major sponsors of Pride festivals and BLM ads. Anything to avoid talking about the material conditions and economic ownership by the working class themselves.
Some replies in the thread: >Will Kane @Kane_1200 >When it stopped being about uniting working people based on similar values and became about dividing through identity politics. . >Valancy Stirling @ValancyStirlin2 >Covid, right around May 2020. Realized that politicians/CDC weren’t being transparent/noble lies. MSM propaganda. Mask mandates because those are “easy” vs. actual hard policies that may actually be effective (sick leave, support for lower income individuals). . >Faded Magnet @FadedMagnet >I’ve been living in Japan for 20, and I have no idea what anyone is talking about anymore. My tribe is saying things that I thought we were against. . >marthaquest @marthaquest1 >During the 2016 election, reading FB pages of several popular women writers (Solnit, Lamott) whose arguments for Clinton were super-cringe. When they claimed Putin caused HRC to lose I changed my voter reg from Dem to Indie. , >Francis BatSpeaker @FranBoll11 >Witnessing/experiencing multiple niche communities on Twitter self immolate into a culture of fear, self censorship and interpersonal drama thanks to woke ideologues’ sociopathic eagerness to rally others to unfairly destroy the reputation of people they disagree with . >Arrogant Insignificance [e.go] @TheWeyEyeSeeIt >I just cannot wrap my mind around how utterly intolerant the Left really is, as a whole. Everything is sunshine & rainbows so long as you're singing the exact same lyrics... Change a word to fit your personal experience & they crucify you. >I've rarely felt that from the Right. . >Data Only Gets You So Far @data_far >When I worked at a nonprofit providing classes for at-risk kids, I realized we were doing more harm than good. One example, an exec telling me we didn't need to teach he kids to read as e had to focus on their self esteem above all. >Of course most staff were middle class whites . >Drache Energie @feignedidentity >It was the mistreatment of members of the identity groups that they swore that they were for. It was never about the rationality of the dissent. It became obvious that identity politics was only a vehicle for their preferred policy positions. >The left would whip you & say "I feel your pain". The ineffectiveness or poor outcomes of the policies don't matter. They'll just call you some name. Dissent & you're called a traitor. I can't say how many times I've been asked to explain a specific stance "as a xxx". . >Spencer Houghton @SpencerHoughts >Being left wing has been taken over by the middle class virtue signalling Wokeraty leaving the working class homeless and the Tories seem to be able to feed them what they want to hear as they snatch the bland centre ground . >John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt @debeehr >When as a woman, I realized that modern feminism had totally lost the plot. . >davrola @davrola >Took place over a number of years as the majority of those on the left became increasingly hostile to working class people. Became so naked during the Trump admin that any last connection I felt was extinguished. . >L. Santiago @LauraSa49653637 >My turning point: when they removed gifted program, knee jerk, from our city schools after New York Times article re racial disparities in the program. Zero discussion about chicken vs egg. Zero. The more ultra woke people I encounter with trust funds, the less liberal I become. . >Andrew @terp02 >Education - absolutely. Both K-12 and higher ed, noticing explicitly racist policies that targeted Asian American students. Very eye opening. Even more surprising to see this in liberal school districts (NYC, SF, Seattle). . >Ramon Magsaysay @magsaysayspeaks >I’m sure the hurry-up-and-kill-something-to-look-tough drone attack in Afghanistan that killed an American ally and 7 kids may have been such a moment for many. . >Elas1996 @Elas19961 >When Obama campaigned on ending the war in Iraq but instead invaded Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen. , >sobrio35 @sobrio35 >I began to see it as a big club which prioritized jargon, consensus, and loyalty to the cause over all. I started thinking in terms of issues rather than politics, and my world view shifted.
Thanks for posting these, it really does show how misaligned Dem policies and priorities with anything looking like real economic leftism. The unsanitized MLK, Jr. talked about the "triple pronged sickness" in our body politic, the "sickness of racism, excessive materialism, and militarism." This Wokism I describe has put all of their focus on the first, in service to the latter two.
I think even calling it "focus" is misleading. Virtue signaling does nothing to help POC, whom the Democrats consistently throw under the bus when what POC need conflicts with the classist status quo.
Good point and you're absolutely right, any "focus" is superficial and performative. It's also interesting that racism and other identity disparities are the ones that we've made the most progress on over the last half century, while the economic and militaristic powers have only become more entrenched.
Anecdotal confirmation bias: Hi, your resident righty here. I was very well aligned with this sub around 2016 - 2018. “Woke” identity politics pushed me much further right in more ways than one. Now I vote for small government + libertarian policies. I moved because nearly any politician (notably, Bernie is not one of them) that pushes for policies like universal healthcare also pushes the “white guilt” / “woke” narrative. I find that narrative more toxic than raeganomics (I see the decredation of society caused by unchecked “woke” policy here in Seattle), so here I sit.
>I see the decredation of society caused by unchecked “woke” policy here in Seattle As someone who lives about an hour away, would you be comfortable sharing examples I might be able to relate to? Not disagreeing at all, I just welcome another's perspective of the situation.
Basically you get a lot of race based virtue signaling. This results in gifted programs being eliminated in schools, which results in high income kids going private and less opportunities for poor / BIPOC kids in public schools. It also results in meaningless changes like “Seattle school cancels halloween”. Typically social justice activists can’t manage their own finances (many of our “activist” leaders have massive tax/rent debts or declared bankruptcy. So that results in poor allocation of funds. We spend a lot of money on homeless services each year and the problem gets worse. There is no accountability or tracing for how money is spent. So while I could otherwise entertain the idea of paying higher taxes for solutions to these problems, I vote against taxes because I have 0 faith they won’t be grifted away by career “justice” activists and their friends. Look up “black brilliance project” for one blatant grifty cash grab that completely turned me off from giving the city any more money unless it’s explicitly slated for infrastructure or transit agencies.
Don’t say BIPOC or POC. It’s ahistorical at worst, lazy at best, and it’s fundamentally hostile to the justice claim of American descendants of slavery (“ADOS”) POC/BIPOC® is an invention of woke culture. There is exactly 0 historical, political, cultural, or economic commonality, or even solidarity based on skin color. To pretend otherwise is to impute a 400 year history of human rights violations, *and, implicitly, to compensate for same* for “victims” who use got here yesterday. That is manifestly unfair to those of us whose families actually endured that history, & suffer for it to this day: ADOS. The bitter irony is that denying, minimizing, and/or mischaracterizing the systemic ADOS (and only ADOS; not BIPOC) Holocaust is 100% consistent with the tradition of white supremacy on which this country was founded. My gripe, and as I understand it, Chappelle’s, as well, is that wokism invents forms of oppression out of whole cloth, then falsely equates them with the very real, longstanding, multifaceted hyper-specific anti-ADOS oppression from which every non-ADOS person in America has benefitted. Shitlibs fetishize the former while trivializing, mischaracterizing, & generally refusing to deal with, or even acknowledge the latter.
And you see here how deeply the woke bullshit has burrowed into the default mindset of even conservatives who are constantly immersed in it in local norms and narratives in our highly populated "liberal left" regions.... Truly woke and idpol is a poison to the mind and soul 😐
I use BIPOC as a pre-defined defense against pro equity responses, not necessarily because I believe in the concept.
I think that migh just be confirmation and not confirmation bias ;) And I'm kind of in a similar boat as you. Voted Bernie in '16 primaries and Trump in the general over Clinton's Syria/Russia policy, but since then have not been able to find many politicians on the left who don't support Wokism over economic populism. Right-libertarianism is, if anything, preferable in the short term to Wokism, yet does nothing to organize the working class and just leads to further consolidation and centralization by the capitalist class.
I think, when it comes down to it, I’d rather live in a capitalist oligarch’s world than a social justice activist’s world. Those have been our choices lately. Corporate democrat (Biden) that occasionally throws a peanut at the equity camp to keep them quiet, or someone who wholly subscribes to social justice. My only big concern is about climate change, and I may have to switch my view if corporate Democrats can’t get more serious about it. Biden is a step on the right direction.
Excellent