Liberal left used to be the tough guys

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

It probably wasn’t like this, but this is how I remember it in my hazy montage of the 90s.
Liberals, atheists, progressives, whateverthefuck…They were the cool kids. I wanted to be like them.

I was a corny christian as a kid. The type to love christmas ever so much, mum! Then, as a rebellious teen, I threw off white jesus and embraced Egyptian (don’t ask) gods and black gods and, quite frankly, a ton of misinformation, but it was better than that jesus nonsense.

But then something big happened! I discovered a group of people who didn’t believe in god at all! They believed in evidence, and if you didn’t have enough to support your claim, motherfucker, FUCK YOU! They believed in reading and knowledge and facts and they would BUST YO ASS in a debate and laugh at your steaming entrails while polishing their claws. Because fuck you if you insist on being willfully ignorant.

They believed in taking no shorts, pullin’ no punches, giving it straight up with no chaser. Science is still true, whether you like it or not, son!

George Carlin, Bill Hicks, Richard Pryor.

I wanted in on this. I remember arguing with some people of a little liberal ass group and getting WAXED! It was an argument about homosexuality, and I got schooled and had my whole world view quake as I learned I had no logical and rational reason for judging anyone’s sexuality. Ah, yess, that shot of heroin was what I am ever chasing! New info to bust through your whole outlook!

Yeah, boy, I wanted to run with these cool kids.

But the thing I thought was dopest about them…they understood that even in areas where conservatives and christians had the upper hands…we could still hit em where it hurts. In the feels. Because it didn’t take any government power or systems of oppression to fuck up somebody’s emotions. You could do that with NO REAL POWER AT ALL, assuming your “victim” gave you that power willingly. It’s genius.

It was like, “Yeah, you elite rich boys have your entire boot in our asses, but we are still having a good time, and laughing at you and you cry babies can’t fucking deal with it.”

I mean, we didn’t kid ourselves. The rich elite still run the show. But we have our freedom of expression and quick wit and fuck it, we just are the cool kids. We could hurt their feelings and make them miserable and they cried and cried about it. It was awesome. Because deep down, we knew. We always knew that if it ever came right down to it…If the elite ever fell and the people got a fair shot in this damn society…we would do it through exchanging ideas. And we would need all the language we got. We could never do it through editing ourselves.

WHEN DID THIS CHANGE??

I feel like the right (alt-right?) STOLE our shit!!! Now they are strutting around like THEY are the cool kids who understand that it isn’t smart to quash language and ideas under the guise of being “sensitive”.

It’s like I blinked and turned around and the liberal left had all this crying victim shit happening. And I don’t mean the government jackboots on our necks. I’m all about crying at that shit. No, I mean, crying because Milo whoethehellever called us some names. WHO GIVES A FUCK? Why are we letting him fucking win with that shit?

Look. I am open to the idea that I’m all the off and lost in how I am looking at this. Because I’ve been so ENTIRELY wrong about so very much that nothing shocks me anymore. But this seems to be a huge shift in how we were the smart ones who knew how to not let silly shit get us going to now we are the easy targets that they just float a meme about and we all start wailing that they won’t stop being mean.

If none of this makes any sense, it’s because I’ve been in a handful of facebook groups long enough to make me worry about an echo chamber. So disregard if you don’t relate to where I’m coming from.

But if you DO feel me…do you agree at all?

2

I do actually. When I was younger and full of bim and vigor (some would say piss and vinegar) but goddmanit fuck you if you don’t like the idea of treating everyone like people until they give you a reason to treat 'em like shit! Fuck you if you don’t understand that the gay girls who went to prom together are better fucking people than you are- based on their actions, not their professed “beliefs.”

It does seem like the “liberal” view used to be a lot harder-assed, and I don’t know when that changed. Maybe when the progressive side embraced “liberal” or whatever.

3

Thank you for your response. Isn’t it “vim” and vigor?

4

Partially, it’s due to media focus: The people who make noise get cameras. That’s always been true. Making noise about oppression and so on gets cameras, so that’s what people notice.

Which ties into my next point: Making noise about oppression works. It gets results. What the Right sees as playing victim is actually the Left using the established power structures to make them the winners, in the form of enforcing anti-discrimination rules and similar policies against the people the Left doesn’t like. I personally dislike this strategy, because I think it’s dangerous and, as you’ve seen, has a poor media image, but it works just the same.

So the Carlin-esque atheists still exist. We don’t make as much noise, and we’re not getting a school or a business to enforce policies to our benefit as often, but we are still out here.

Finally, notice your own bias, here: You see the Left as whiny and the Alt-Right as strong, but they’re mostly doing the same things; namely, arguing on the Internet. The main difference is that the Alt-Right does it with more obvious insults.

5

Hahaha, at my bias being that I find the alt right strong. No.

Listen. I’m not saying one shouldn’t whine. I tried to put that in my OP, but let me try again…I’M FINE WITH CRYING, COMPLAINING, BEING A VICTIM. Because I AM a victim. I really am. I’m not making it up. I really did get discriminated against for housing ENOUGH times to understand it is a real societal problem that happens because I am BLACK. So, I cry about that all the time, I scream about it, I complain.

What I DON’T do is cry about shit like name calling on the internet. Do you see the difference? The liberals are literally complaining because Milo calls names online. Literally. That is it. Because he tweets mean things.

6

Fat fingered it. Yes it is . :o

7

Your OP made me think about when I was a punk kid, full of anger. Aggressively tolerant, perhaps. But within my group, there would always be the sensitive kid crying because someone was mean to him or her, and then i (or one of my more aggressive friends) would go and be devastating in response to the issue. The more effective ones would brush off and laugh at the ones in charge - but there were always the ones would weep in response. Maybe it just seems like the weeping ones are more prominent now, and the fierce liberals don’t seem as obvious.

8

Hmmm! You might be on to something here.

This has been so annoying to me. I personally don’t have to be mean to anyone. I don’t give a fuck. You sensitive? Fine. I will do your dance, probably, to keep from hurting your feels. But what I HATE is when the people on my side show weakness to the enemy about these kinds of things. If you come across people who WON’T acquiesque to your sensitivity, you gotta SUCK IT UP! Or else you give them the win! You are making us ALL look like a bunch of weak crying babies and they literally get to have the EMOTIONAL victory ON TOP of the fact that they are already on the side of the rich elite and government. If we gotta get screwed the long way, at least let us get our reach around, which was the ability to not walk around with our feels hurt all the time about dumb shit.

9

In my own hazy montage of the 90s (grin!) I am in particular thinking of a specific incident. In my fairly redneck town high school, two girls went to homecoming or prom or whatever shit dance was the big deal. I didn’t go, but heard all about the lezzies who went to the dance together. Heard about it all day, and got in all kinds of faces about it. I was seen as a …scary chick. And around lunchtime, I talked to the girls in question. I said, look, am I defending your right to whatever sexuality you are, or am I defending your right to not be gossiped about by jackholes? Becasue that might or might not influence how I talk to the assholes who won’t shut up. Either way, I am going to do my best to shut them up. I just like to know what angle I am defending. One of the girls kinda sniveled, and said well, we are just friends so I don’t know why people are talking. The other girl said “I am gay. She is NOT my girlfriend. But I AM gay.” She knew what was being said and flat out did not care, for her sake. She was pissed that her friend was upset. I was pissed that our friend was upset. My scary, delinquent type friends were pissed that our friend was upset, and that our other friend was being slammed as well.

But in order for us to get angry at people getting hurt - it needs someone to get hurt. It just seems like the hurt people are becoming the face of the attitude. I miss the **attitude **being the face of the attitude, of that makes sense.

10

Yes, raventhief, that actually made perfect sense.

11

What I see is that Milo got banned from Twitter, which proves the tactic works.

I don’t like it any more than you do, but unless you admit that it’s effective, you won’t understand why it keeps happening.

12

Maybe someone or someones decided that aggressive engagement was itself a manifestation of the “inherent violence of the system” so we should switch to an appeal to niceness.

Or a large segment of that generation just made it to the phase in life where the possibility of having to run for it or of a punch being thrown or a job being lost became something to care about avoiding, so they decided they’d rather try and seek to create an etiquette of things we “do not say in polite company” lest sensibilities be offended – a mirror image of how the *even older *generations had run their public lives.

Yes, the Left side was once dominant among the rabble-rousing rebels, the transgressors, the ones that gave the bluehairs the vapors… not willing to folow norms just because they were the norms, but not special-snowflakey either! But the real confrontational rebels who dare get in The Man’s face are always a small minority. Most everyone else just wants to get along with their lives and disruptive rebels… disrupt. Eventually if they keep at it they become seen as just Angry Old Cranks.

13

Maybe this will help. I don’t give a rat’s ass about Milo.

My personal angst at the moment has to do with the twerp who won the election. I’m pretty sick of hearing his name and seeing his face. Unfortunately, he seems like a “gift” that gonna keep on giving. Guess I’m going to have to get used to it.

Maybe take some time away from Facebook. Spend time here or talking to folks in person. Facebook is good for staying in touch, looking at pictures of babies, and that’s about it. It’s not very good for meaningful discussion in any sense.

14

I don’t think it works at all. I think him getting banned on Twitter made him even more huge. Now even the people in my problack echo chambers know him and are all a blather about him, passing his stuff around and such. They literally didn’t know who the dude was before.

I think he has gotten bigger and bigger because of his ability to hurt the feelings of a group that is openly letting him know exactly how he can attack them and win every time.

15

Honey CHILE I ran to facebook to get away from yall.

Turns out, maybe I’m really running from my damn self. Don’t that always be the way?

16

Tried to change that previous message and ran out of time.

There are a lot of people out there who are plenty mad. The crucial piece that’s missing, I think, is what to do with that energy. I just don’t want all of this to end up like Occupy Wall Street. Months and months of taking it to the street that ultimately accomplished nothing. There’s a quote attributed to FDR, that I like (even though there’s no evidence he actually said it). When he was presented with some plans from labor, Roosevelt told them: “I agree with you, I want to do it, now make me do it.” Can we take this energy from the bottom and push it up into politics - into policy, into action? Because if we wait for the Democratic Party to come up with The Plan, nothing is going to happen.

Let’s take this angry and start pushing. If some people need to cry and moan a little, well, let them. Just don’t let them be the only voice.

17

The answer, one would think, should be pretty obvious.

Many on the left traded ideals for empathy (unless you happen to be blue collar republican, then the ideals were traded for hate).

Once the ideals are gone then, instead of an inclusive set of goals, the policy turns to whomevers turn it is to be the victim of the day. Any resistance to the policies put forth to solve the perceived problem for the victim of the day is met with accusations of racism/sexism/whatever instead of a reasoned argument based on ideals. This, as far as I can tell, causes two problems.

The first is that, after a while, people who disagree with a small part of the policies put forth are instantly attacked. Not fully behind abortion? Have some moral qualms about it? Woman hater! Think border security is important and illegal immigration is not ok? Racist!

And so on.

So those people either drop out or vote for someone who isn’t calling them deplorable.

Second, the focus becomes the needs of the particular victim of the day and the rest of the people end up feeling excluded. Hell, Bernie Sanders is ‘humiliated’ that the liberals cannot talk to blue collar people.

So the party, instead of fighting in a united manner, ends up balkaning along identity group lines with the group that whines the most winning.

Slee

18

I don’t know, I think its possible to have ideals AND empathy. What I don’t have is the energy, not anymore.

19

I think some of it may be age, and the difference in how generations were raised.

“Kids today” (meaning up to and including college age, and bit beyond) were raised in a “zero tolerance” anti-bullying environment, where anyone, whether aggressor or defender, who was caught fighting would be suspended and expelled, and the schools’ disciplinary focus was on peacekeeping and getting your kumbayayas out in assemblies and small group meetings. And part of those anti-bullying curricula is that name calling is just as bad as hitting people.

They are living their formative years in a society where if your neighbor is being annoying, you call the cops to deal with it. If you think you see a small child being neglected, you call social services. If your kid’s teacher is being a dick, you call the principal or superintendent. If your coworker is being an asshole, you go to human resources. No one is supposed to confront anyone directly anymore, because “you never know” and “you need to be safe”.

We don’t teach kids how to fight. We don’t demonstrate to them *how *to fight. We liberals, I mean. The conservatives are, true to form, still teaching the old ways. Get in there. Confront. Name call. Win without worrying about hurting other people. And it’s working.

The flip side to “Can’t we all just get along?” is not knowing how to handle it when we can’t. The dark side of developing empathy and believing that everyone is worthy of respect is not believing you have the right or skill to call people out when they don’t actually deserve respect.

The loudest in your face don’t back down and make peace liberals on my Facebook feed right now overwhelmingly have one thing in common - they’re older. None of them are under 50. The whiny ones are young. They’re the ones we told the world was fair, and they don’t know what to fucking do now that they’ve figured out we lied to them. And I don’t even know what to tell them, because I don’t know how to really change anything, either. I can argue until my fingers bleed on Facebook, but at the end of the day…what have I accomplished? Nothing real.

20

You are right. As you do be. It’s just so frustrating because there is a way to still hate your enemies, who are indeed bullies, and fight back at them, (whether you win or not).

You can do those things BUT you can make a distinction. Between their real crimes against you and the shit they are doing SOLELY because they know it will hurt your feelings. Those things in particular, I fear if we don’t get a grip on that, they damn near beat us with mere mind control.

I like, I legit know people who are crippled when internet trolls begin to attack them with all the things that they have been taught is taboo to ever have to hear. People I have counted as friends and defended with everything I got in me have blocked me for laughing at a joke they find problematic or disagreeing with them on a minor point…I understand this and I’m fine with it. I even let them know, I will never block you back and will always be waiting if you want to come back and discuss things more. But it just bothers me that their true enemies get to win in a sense. It’s all just me being overwhelmed with remembering when my side at least had this one weapon of understanding how offending and offended worked…and now it seems we don’t even have that.

To be honest, I think I’m burned out and believe deep down that some people want to be victims. So this is probably my own shit to work through and not an accurate picture of anything. Y’all I don’t know. But I appreciate the discussion .