I did. I see a bunch of .ml’s clearly and strongly saying that we don’t believe in accelerationism.

Fact is, I could very easily find 5-10 sources, but you would likely just find some nuance that proves your point while ignoring all the nuance that proves my point. It’s pointless.

Then talking is just as pointless! You’re assuming that I’d dismiss your sources without even giving me the chance to look at them in good faith. That itself is bad faith.

Are you saying that democrats, either as individual politicians or colllective groups that represented the party, were not the ones peddling ideas associated with “woke 1”. Are you saying the ideas of “woke 1” in its entirety weren’t actually bad, but it was perceived as bad unfairly?

Yes, both of those things. The ideas that the democrats espoused during that time were not as radical as they were perceived. More radical ideas were espoused by random individuals who were nowhere near to the levers of power. Now, obviously, I can’t vouch for every idea on every 15 year-old’s Tumblr blog, but whether ideas that random people had were good or bad is beside the point.

“Woke” is a flexible word that can mean basically anything. If you want to define it such that it’s in line with the Democrat’s former policies, then fine, my position is that “woke” ideas were not that extreme or bad. If you want to define it as including more extreme positions, then my position is that the Democrats were not as woke as people think. But just alluding to these vague concepts makes it impossible to actually evaluate anything and ground it in facts. Which is why I’ve been trying to shift the focus onto specific policy positions.

Which brings me back to my question of whether there’s anything in Clinton’s 2016 platform regarding trans rights that goes beyond equal protections and privacy rights, the same sorts of things that El-Sayed supports. If you stop talking about these “perceptions” of vaguely defined terms, and look at specific policy positions, then we can have an actual, grounded conversation, that isn’t just your memory of a perception against my memory of a perception, which obviously goes nowhere.

I got better things to do with my life than to dig up sources to defend my opinion to a random person on the internet

If you have better things to do than source your claims, you probably have better things to do than to make them in the first place.

I love polling podcasts as they are pure numbers and facts.

Well, facts about people’s perceptions of things.

I do all this so when I need to have an opinion on something, I don’t need to spend hours “doing homework”. If I felt like I didn’t understand something and needed to research it, I would.

Then I would think that providing a source would be trivially easy. You’re saying that you’ve already done your homework, you just didn’t want to show it to me because… I don’t really know why. Like, when I ask for a source, I’m asking where your information is coming from. If your information is coming from a podcast, then cite the podcast. It’s not a question of whether you’ve researched it. Do you think of sources as proving to some teacher that you put effort in? They’re about showing the reader where the information comes from, so they can evaluate follow along and evaluate it themselves.

I didn’t know what “woke 1” meant, I googled it and found an article that seemed to validate exactly what I’m saying. “Woke 1” is not used as a good phase of the democratic party. Period. The end. That still not good enough for you? Fine.

The perception of “woke 1” being bad is something I never once disagreed with. What I disagreed with was whether that perception reflected the actual reality of what the Democrats said or did.

I’ll take that as a no, then.

You were told that there are discussions on .ml and elsewhere about whether China is socialist. But you assume that the people saying it isn’t are the same people saying it is. The reality is that .ml and other leftist spaces don’t represent a monolith, we don’t have some official party line everyone has to accept. There are some users who argue that China is socialist and some who say it isn’t, there is no contradiction unless you assume those two groups are the same people, rather than just being on the same instance.

Can I ragebait them?

Always 😄

US certainly had a bunch of illicit, criminal side quests

Lmao. Every bad thing that the US did was just a “side quest” that deviates from the overall pure and good intentions. Every bad thing the USSR did shows that they were inherently evil.

Mohammad Mossadegh was the progressive, peaceful, prime minister of Iran, who had zero alignment with the Soviets and only tried to assert Iran’s autonomy over its natural resources against the British colonizers who had built their entire empire off of stealing Iranian oil - deposed by the CIA in the name of “anti-communism,” and replaced by a literal monarch that spent decades hunting down and annihilating the Iranian left with secret police. But of course, that’s just a “side quest.”

Operation Condor, in which the US engaged in widespread election interference across South America, promoting right wing authoritarians and setting up “banana republics” to keep the cheap goods coming, that whole continent was just a little “side quest.”

Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, where the US dropped massive amounts of chemical weapons on poor rice farmers trying to assert control of their own land and resources. Indonesia, the mass killings of hundreds of thousands of activists, teachers, ethnic minorities, etc, by the US-backed Suharto regime, once again, a regrettable little “side quest.”

Exactly how many countries do you have to do “side quests” of terror and looting in the name of “stopping totalitarianism” do you have to do before they count as the “main quest?”

Christ, finally. The amount I have to twist people’s arms on this website to do the most basic homework to support their positions. It’s completely ridiculous.

That article is very scant on details and specifics. It mentions “defund the police,” which was mostly a slogan used by activists rather than the party, and which, as the article mentions (and as I mentioned previously) never actually went anywhere and was walked back, with Biden calling specifically to “fund the police” and with many places raising police budgets instead. In spite of this, there was a perception that Democrats actually did defund the police. Not the reality.

It doesn’t really talk about democrat’s positions on trans rights at all. It mentions #MeToo, and one random state assemblywoman who talked about cancelling Thanksgiving.

My whole point is not that there was no perception of the Democrats being woke, but that it was just a perception. Nothing in that article actually challenges that. It just quotes other people who had that perception. You can say, “politics is about feelings and perceptions” but all that makes me think of is how Republicans “felt like” Obama turned the country into a socialist republic.

Here is a Ballotpedia page for Hillary Clinton’s stances on LGBT rights in 2016. I would love to know which parts of it are “particularly pro-trans” rather than just keeping the government out of trans people’s business and ensuring equal protection under the law.

Yeah? Can you show us one?

Lmao show us anybody claiming any of this shit.

The time we’re discussing when the Democrats were supposedly “too woke.” They had the same positions then that you call reasonable now.

You just don’t know it because you don’t care about the facts. The Democratic Party was never “particularly pro-trans” beyond the government staying out of people’s business.

He basically said the government doesn’t need to get involved.

That’s literally what the Democrats were saying in “Woke 1.”

I’m not so sure. I think they might need Americans to come civilize their countries by bombing their families and killing their children. Sure, some women will be killed in the process, but it’s all in the name of feminism. And yeah, we might take some oil and resources while we’re there, but surely we deserve a bit of compensation for carrying on the White Man’s Burden.

Lol, now you’re just making shit up.

The point is with this sort of narrative that isn’t really based on hard evidence in the first place, virtually anything that happens can be spun to support it, and the inconvenient parts just glossed over. It’s just based on feelings so the only way to refute it is if you just happen to feel differently.

As for El Sayed, I’m not saying everybody has gone full anti-woke. I’m just saying the Democratic party has chilled out in general. There’s gonna be exceptions.

So what you are saying then is that everybody had been woke. Because otherwise, if it’s just that there are some politicians that are woke and some that are anti-woke, and it was like that before, then nothing’s really changed.

But that’s the thing. Not everybody in the party was woke. And if you relied on actual evidence instead of memories and feelings, you’d see that that’s obviously true. If everyone had been woke, that raises the question of why wasn’t there legislation that you can actually point to?

If anything, politicians generally didn’t really talk about trans people or have clearly defined stances, until Republicans decided to make it a central issue of their campaign.

I think you’ve blindly accepted this narrative as dogma without any real evidence and anything that happens you could just twist into supporting the narrative. If Talarico and Hamilton had lost, you’d just say that it shows they were too supportive of trans rights, since they won, you say it’s because they weren’t fully supportive of them. Meanwhile, the example of El-Sayed is just written off because he doesn’t fit the narrative you already decided on. It’s nonsense.

To me, this reaction from the community was a problem.

Both politicians and the community.

Ah, see, there you have it. The community. When people talk about the left going too far, what they mean is almost always like some random Tumblr blog with 10 followers.

Guess what? There are still random Tumblr blogs with 10 followers saying all sorts of crazy things, wielding zero political influence just as they did back then. Fucking, saying crazy shit is part of growing up, part of sorting out ideas, and some of the “crazy shit” that’s taken to represent “the left” is literally just some 15 year old. You’re never going to enforce any kind of “party discipline” across everyone in the country.

What’s changed is not that teenagers suddenly stopped saying crazy shit, or lost the power they never had in the first place, but that the Republicans fucked shit up badly enough that people started having better things to worry about. And to some extent, people have just become more accustomed to the internet and the fact that there are always people saying all kinds of shit and it doesn’t fucking matter. And frankly, the most woke shit by the edgiest teen could barely compete with the shit Elon Musk tweets out regularly to huge audiences anyway.

So, in my opinion, this whole narrative is bullshit based on nothing but memories of perceptions.

That’s completely shifting the goalposts. Whether Republicans viewed the Democrats as being woke is an entirely different question from whether the Democrats actually were woke. Republicans believed Democrats for reasons I already explained, in my first reply and elsewhere in this thread.

The reality is that the Republican perception of the Democrats had more to do with their own minds and their own circles and their own conditions, rather than what Democrats actually said or did. Many of these people are just diehard reactionaries and unreachable anyway.

Also, Democrats won midterm races regardless of what their stance on trans rights was. El-Sayed for example did not (to my knowledge) adopt any anti-trans positions, and politicians like Talarico and Hamilton (Kansas) conceded on sports but overall had positive messaging.

This is exactly why it’s important to ground your narratives in hard facts rather than vague memories, because if you compare politicians’ rhetoric then to now, how much has it actually shifted? It’s more that Republicans overplayed their hand on the issue, while also fucking up in other, bigger ways, like in Iran. So the rhetoric that’s remembered as being “too extreme” and the rhetoric that’s seen as “reasonable” could be the exact same words, and what’s actually changed is people’s perception of that rhetoric. Which is meaningless for the conclusions and narratives you’re drawing.

So much of the rhetoric about “woke 1” is just “you remember how crazy it was, right?” without ever actually discussing what specifically was so crazy about it. And the reason that there’s nothing specific anyone can point to is that it was massively overblown. The left was never anywhere close to the levers of power, it was always centrists who at best sometimes pandered to an organic movement while doing little in terms of actual policy. It’s the same shit with like, “remember when the Democrats defunded the police” when in fact police budgets were raised almost everywhere, it was just a perception that that happened.

1. Who is? The Democratic Party? Did they make it a law that companies have to include pronouns in all their emails? Or is it a bunch a random people in random organizations independently choosing to be accommodate to shifting norms?

2. “Fatigued” is so laughable.

Dearest Teresa, I fear whether our correspondence may continue, as my hands grow weary and more weary with each passing day. On the eve, the Union army (my coworker) hounded and harried us (politely asked me to add pronouns to my emails) until my feet grew blisters and I felt I could press on no longer, but still I knew, I could not grant myself a moment’s reprieve, lest I be caught, and killed in cold blood (get an email from HR).

Y’all desperately need a reality check.

It’s my understanding that there was a backlash to democrats going all in on woke issues.

I asked for a specific policy, not vague allusions to “going all in on woke issues.”

If you’re focusing on rhetoric rather than policy, then fine, provide me some actual, specific examples of that rhetoric.

Relying on vague perceptions and imperfect memories is just bullshit. How I remember it is very different from what you’re saying.

Exactly. The people actually forcing weird sex stuff on people are the ones promoting genital inspections of minors, overturning Roe V. Wade, and trying to force women to be some image of a 1950’s “tradwife.”

a truly independent body

Get back to me when you’ve found one.