there are not spaces for men in the left quite the same way as there is on the right.

I agree with this, actually, but I think the problem goes even deeper. For about fifty years, huge portions of the bourgeois western left have stigmatized concepts like struggle and comradeship and militancy as “toxically masculine.” In fact these are neither masculine nor feminine, but human; and becoming an adult means realizing these same deeply human qualities within oneself. This can only be done communally. Very many young people emerge from childhood, look at the bourgeois left (it is the most visible), and despair; and they turn thus to the right, which claims to offer a path to the human qualities mentioned. Of course, the right is lying, for they too want people to be good consumers and wage slaves who never question imperialism or the capitalist system. But there is on the right a show of comradeship and militancy – "the left calls you toxically masculine? Well, we’re toxically masculine and proud! – and young people turn to it like a thirsty man in the desert.

(This latter, by the way, you find among young women as well as men, though the male version of the phenomenon is much more noticed. The material conditions of capitalism deny both men and women humanity, but women rather more. The right’s “solution” to this is to complete the subordination of woman to man, in theory as a kind of “helpmate,” but actually more like a slave. Thus, the thought goes, women can “participate” in the human qualities which the male embodies; but she becomes human only by emptying and negating her humanity. We hear much today about the supposed “feminization” of men. This is not what is going on. Men are stripped by capitalism of their basic human qualities of struggle and militancy; hence, women cannot draw from men these qualities; and as a result many women become resentful of the “impassivity” of men. But the blame is put in the wrong place, on secondary social factors instead of the system).

One of the things that actually drew me to communism when I was younger was the fact that, compared to the idiot beer-swilling, Bush-loving, war-mongering-but-also-draft-dodging conservatives I was surrounded by, communists like Che and Stalin and Kim Jong-Il seemed to embody a true, authentic, and positive masculinity. They were as different from these would-be “manly” posers as night is from day. Stalin was the man who industrialized a continent. Lenin was a titan of moral and intellectual strength – almost a frightening demigod of the mind. Mao fought for years a brutal guerilla war. My understanding has gotten a lot more sophisticated since then, but I wish more young men could have that same experience.

Liberals seem to have this weird idea that they always need to do sex over economics in their analyses, because Marx didn’t understand the power of horniness or something. (You bet he did, he worked with fucking Engels).

I’ll do you one better, Ho Chi Minh was reportedly celibate his entire life and didn’t turn Nazi. Though I wouldn’t be surprised if liberals think he did.

You mean to say that –

• switching candidates halfway through the election

• having your replacement candidate be one of the few people somehow less popular than Biden

• having said candidate go around openly endorsing genocide

• telling leftists to ignore this, because genocide isn’t really a big deal

– isn’t some kind of winning strategy to Unite the Left?

Haven’t checked out Hasan, but I’ve been watching the online meltdown, and it’s pretty hilarious. E.g., from the Destiny sub (ngl, had me at the title):

Source: the ghost of Kiev (excuse me, Kyiv or whatever dumbass way they spell it)

Liberals, in my experience, think that US evangelicalism is the paradigm for all religions (despite the fact that evangelicalism as Americans understand it developed quite recently within global Christianity). Hence they assume that every religion is in itself basically static, because fundamentally incoherent; it consists in a few principles, badly understood and adopted originally for political ends, which must be defended at all costs and never approached with any kind of nuance. Thus we get religion as brand or identity, rather than a way of life. If the average American Protestant, by and large, believes nothing and bows mostly to secularism in his day-to-day actions, but proclaims loudly (and as a kind of remnant of earlier faith) that you must “read the BI-BUHL and accept Jesus or you won’t be SAVED” – well, then, the average Muslim must similarly see the truth of western liberalism, and for reasons merely eccentric or perverse insist on “oppressing women,” etc., and this can never change. Or so thinks the liberal.

But the thing is, most religions are not like that. Catholicism is not like that; most Protestants are not like that; nor is Islam like that. They are living systems of life and belief, which one can accept or reject on their own merits. They are not dead signifiers, like US evangelicalism is: for the latter is nothing but bourgeois “secularism” with a tacked-on Christian “theme.” But liberals find the American view of religion easy to accept, because their own politics and philosophy are also inconsistent, virtue-signaling, and confused.

There is a weird phenomenon from both anti-communists as well as a lot of ultraleft and leftcom communists themselves of applying a “one drop rule” to socialism, where socialism is only socialism if it’s absolutely pure without a single internal contradiction. But no society in the history of humankind has been pure, they all contain internal contradictions and internal contradictions are necessary for one form of society to develop into the next.

This is a really good way of putting it. So much of ultraleftism is in fact an idealist denial of basic dialectical materialism.

Today is the US presidential election. And everybody online and offline is in the most annoying state of hysteria imaginable.

Since it doesn’t make any difference who gets elected, I think I’m just going to sit back and watch the fireworks.

AI has finally accomplished the impossible: making Macron look cool.

Because they have no material analysis, and no understanding of geopolitics; hence they have no notion of critical support. It’s all a very shallow kind of morality where good = talking like US Democrats, and bad = anything else.

I’m not a fan of Putin, but I do support the Russian intervention (better term than invasion, since the war actually began in 2014, with the junta government as the aggressor). That doesn’t mean I like the current Russian state, or consider it communist, etc.

Donbas is Gaza if Gaza had a powerful neighbor, who (for various flawed reasons) was willing and able to intervene and stop the genocide. Of course, libsocs like Lowkey_Iconoclast can’t possibly see things in that kind of nuance.

That butthurt look on Netanyahu’s face…

How do you vote in a “vital” way? Do you fill out this little circles with, I don’t know, more panache or something?

Nope, no fascist indoctrination going on here. None whatsoever.

Who is Anakin in this scenario?

“Real life superheroes”

OMG IT’S JUST LIKE TV, I’M VOOOOOOOTINNNNNGGGGGGG

Man, she sounds just like Biden, Obama, and Clinton!

Funny how nothing gets better even though we keep electing these people who are basically the American version of Lenin.

Or: pretend to be a shitlib, and then when they react and become Marxist, go “so hey, Bobby, you know all those times I said I was out at the bridge club? I was going to Party meetings.”

Either a bonding moment, or a “whoah dad is crazy” moment, depending on how you spin it.