talking about left wing discourse as a single unified entity is insane, when it's millions or billions of people with different beliefs, formations, etc. Like in everything else, some discourse will be productive and some will be misguided.
It’s not very hard to find smart, well informed left wing / progressive discussion - if that’s what you’re looking for. I think it would be great if we got better at recognising that a lot of political discussion pretty silly. The more attention we give to cranks when we straw man our political opposites by spotlighting the latest silly trite out of their mouths the more we elevate them within their own political tribe.
I wonder if this might be easier to fix in Australia than the US because our compulsory voting system means politicians can’t win by mobilising their base, when everybody votes you need to persuade the other side to win
compulsory vote in the US & Canada would be interesting. It also has no chance of happening as the right in the US is focusing so much energy making it hard for minorities to vote because they know it would fuck them
One of my exes is to the left of the literal Cuban communist party. I'm right of the Cuban communists, yet also left of the UK's Labour Party. The UK's Labour Party is to the left of the USA's Democrat party.
She's an anarcho-communist. Cuban communism is famously the opposite of an anarchy.
A lot of “SJW” rhetoric is telling people that you know more about their circumstances that they do and know what is best for them, as your shown by your comment, to an actual previously poor person in Africa who used what we would call low-wage jobs to pull themself up by the bootstraps.
Perfect - just because people are poor doesn't mean they're stupid. They can still make decisions for themselves based on the realities on ground vs. utopian visions on what the world should look like.
A fallacy that's common when conversations enter these waters is that one person can be a "representative" of any group of people.
I think the discussion is great, but don't think we've concluded therefore that $2/hr is a fine thing for Africans to be paid and all is well again, because one user has said a similar job helped them get out of poverty.
The key thing to remember about "SJWs" is that they want to improve the world for the folks who need it most. Sometimes it does involve changing patterns people fall into without realizing, and sometimes "SJWs" get it terribly wrong. Poor people aren't stupid, but they are often stuck in some way of thinking or behaving (as anyone in their situation would be), and it's not always productive or helpful to "just" give them what they ask for directly.
But to deride someone for wanting a better life for another person strikes me as needlessly cynical. Why put that out into the world, why justify the hate?
