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The whole world is shifting hard to the right. It's pretty crazy to see happen in real time.
Something something "weak men" something something "hard times"
Male fragility will kill us all.
Male Fragility Will Kill Us All
You're a fool if you think that far-right conservatism is exclusive to men (or that only allowing women in power would solve it)
Women buying into patriarchy doesn't make it any less of a phenomenon or any less dangerous.
Good thing that comment I replied to said "male fragility" and not "the patriarchy" or I'd probably agree with them.
You're a fool if you extrapolated that meaning from my words. The male fragility drives the culture of insecurity, greed, and competition. Women can be infected as well, but they are not the drivers of this psychosis.
Male fragility doesn't drive the culture of insecurity. It's an artificially introduced wedge tactic intended to keep the working class infighting.
Everyone with money and power are pretty happy with the status quo.
If you ever find yourself thinking that any regular working person is "the problem", step back and ask yourself who baited the trap. Some external narrative drew one of you in to make the other pissed off.
Like, they kept telling Cletus that the immigrants are why his paycheck is small, and that the big city liberals want to eradicate him. He says "Damn those immigrants" and then you come out of the woodwork telling him he's the problem with the country and then boom: you're suddenly the liberal who he's heard hates him, word made flesh, just as the prophecy foretold.
Like, how goddamn convenient that it's male fragility. How awesome for the 1% that out of everyone and everything, they hand you a loaded term like that that will CERTAINLY be taken out of context as a blanket condemnation of 50% of the population by anyone who doesn't study sociology (spoiler alert, MOST PEOPLE)
Like, if someone said to you that it was a result of a slowness of male development, and thus the Latin for "slow" was appropriate here, and that the accepted term that you should use in the world to try and initiate a thoughtful, respectful exchange of ideas in good faith, so you should say "male retardation", would you say "ya that sounds like a great way to talk to men and I can't comprehend any reason why anyone might be standoffish when hearing it"?
Again, you're a chump. You're brandishing a term INTENTIONALLY loaded to incite division among the working class. You are a useful idiot to the people oppressing you.
Counterexample: Disney in Florida.
Fascism is not actually good for business. Fascism demands that the most successful business in the state must lick boots or be punished.
I agree that Disney is having a spat with specifically Ron DeSantis, and I think it does make them uncomfortable.
That being said, it's a very personal feud. DeSantis thought he could use them as a punching bag for some political points... and he was wrong. The actual law came down on Disney's side, no matter what DeSantis as an individual thought.
And this is why I'd still think that as a whole I personally would still say that Disney is still happy with the status quo.
The kinda icky reason why Disney knew the law would come down on their side is the same reason Mickey Mouse is still protected under copyright: Disney WRITES the law. They shovel money at politicians and LITERALLY write the bills they want them to pass.
So as uncomfortable as a spat with a man is, a system in which they can pay-to-legislate is still a status quo they're very happy with, and I don't think that was ever in jeapordy.
I will say that I was pleasantly surprised at what appeared to be a social conscience from Disney. I'm skeptical that it's strictly rooted in benevolence, but at this point even if the Ulta powerful do the right things (even if for maybe less-than-perfect reasons), I'm tired enough to just accept it as a W and move on.
They gave 50k to a single-candidate super PAC called American Leadership Action which supported Dr Oz's candidacy last election cycle lol.
The last half century has basically been the US propping up fascist governments who will cater to private business interests of the US, like every coup they've sided with and helped fund in socialist countries that was basically the whole point.
Exactly and the flipside of this is targeting the liberals and catering to the idea they can be morally superior, and building this meritocratic notion where the "Cletus" actually deserves to be poor and stupid. This mechanism basically removes individuals from the political economy and moralizes the outcomes caused by it as representative of their individual virtue. This idea of "virtue hoarding" has been used to describe this which I think can be pretty accurate. It can't solve anything either, and it's actually a very conservative approach to the topic at large because it doesn't acknowledge the economic material causes of why they're like this or try to solve the thing that causes these disparities. It makes it all about the individual and their moral choices. A lot of what's ignored from the people who liberals love to appropriate in their ideaology, like MLK Jr, is the radical notion of economic equality that made them so unpopular at the time, even among people who were morally opposed to racism. If you removed these prejduces from "Cletus," a lot of the city liberal types would still find him detestable as a person, and he would probably be asked to leave if he tried to enter one of their workplaces. Despite him having more materially in common with the liberal professional worker, the liberal likely believes themselves to have more in common with their bosses.
Exactly! And again, it's absolutely manufactured.
The anti-trans agenda is the most brilliantly executed wedge issue I've seen in a long time. Most "yokels" don't have any personal experience with trans people. They have no reason to hate them. Even if they're creeped out by what they don't understand, the numbers are so few that you couldn't under any stretch of the imagination convince them that they're a threat.
But the "foaming at the mouth big city liberals who hates anyone from outside the city" archetype? THAT looks like a threat. There are tons of city folk. They run the government. Do they really hate me?
You want to keep the working class infighting? Drop a trans issue into the mix. The country man says "Boy, now I tell you h'what, I'm not sure about that" and some genius will come out of the woodwork and say "FACIST!" and then boom, they have presented as the rabid threat. Sides are entrenched. Dialogue immediately erodes to ad hominem, both sides paint their strawmen, and they're convinced that it isn't a dispute over ideas but rather of the other side being intrinsically defective as people.
And in the squabble, education funding is cut. Class sizes grow. More money funneled to defence. Raytheon gets a contract to vaporize brown kids. CEO gets a 200 million bonus. The system works as intended.
It's way more likely someone knows a gay person than a trans person at this point so there's that unknown factor to exploit. It's also just more of a reality that your gender identity doesn't matter as much materially to the sort of path in life you're expected to take, and there's a lot of economic reasons for that. One being the cost of living and housing has already required two working adults in many places, another is industry specialization and professionalization. We also have a lot more identity technologies available to us, ways we can construct and inhabit identities and validate other people's identities. The funny thing is in many cases these virile straight male types are actually using the same gender ideology as the trans person, they're just as much discovering and finding out how to express their male-ness as the trans person is discovering how to best display the gender or non they prefer to be seen as. Even the adage "you aren't born a man, you become one" is basically the same notion Judith Butler presents under feminist theory. And of course the male identity stuff is commodified to shit just like anything else can be.
All the queer meme pages were making fun of Raytheon's DEI program this year so I think there's more awareness about this stuff in general now. I'm at a place where they've been putting in a top-down program like this and it's also the non-conforming people in the company asking the hard questions in the sessions to the diversity industry consultants which is great to see. I've also experienced the liberal "ally" condemnation in public once which was very uncomfortable, all because they heard a friend (who had transitioned) and I call each other "dude," which they were quick to point out very loudly to the entire party, "UH SHE'S A WOMAN!" Thankfully my friend loudly responded back "women can be dudes too" which shut her down, but I was just like girl get out of our business, and why are you listening to my friend and I greet each other, you don't know anything about our relationship. The worst thing is she was sober doing this lol.
You're right that I am afraid, but it's easy for me to articulate my fears without just calling other people names. And saying "triggered".
I'm afraid that the popularity of wedge issues manufactured to sow conflict within the working class is so effective. I'm afraid that good people (you) are being manipulated into participating enthusiastically in that manufactured conflict. I'm afraid that people like you, who have the capacity to channel their righteous anger have been conned into being upset against amorphous abstract boogeymen rather than the real concrete people responsible for real concrete injustice.
I know.
Except you're ignoring the entire reality of male fragility in your attempt to shift the blame. The alpha males, the CEO billionaires, the dickhead fascists; they're all fragile males. (Like you.)
I'm not ignoring anything. Male fragility is absolutely a thing, and I'm telling you that it is intentionally manufactured.
Beyond that, I'm telling you that the vocabulary and channels of discourse around male fragility are ALSO manufactured in a way to make those discussions as least likely to be successful as possible.
How often does bringing up male fragility outside of your echo chambers result in positive outcomes? Never?
It's nurtured in foolish young males by insecure and fearful old males. It's still fragile, and it's still a male dominated phenomenon that is STILL going to kill us all, and you throwing a tantrum won't change anything.
If my tantrum won't change anything, then I take sincere comfort in the knowledge that yours will. Good luck.
Is the irony not palpable?
I'm not even disputing that the sociological concept of male fragility is real. My entire thesis is just "The discussion is loaded to inevitably result in division".
And we have people crawling out of the woodwork to say "triggered", "facist", and "chickenshit".
It's so on the nose that I genuinely can't tell if you're actually serious or making an incredibly poignant tongue-in-cheek intentional support of my thesis.
While internet points aren’t always the best metric for things, it seems like more people read what he had to say and thought he made sense
Are you ok?
Ignorant projection.
Please explain to me in detail how a matriarchal social structure would solve this, with relevant historical examples to support your claims.
Also, "women are too dumb to think for themselves, they must be brainwashed" is one of the strangest supposedly left-wing takes I've seen on this site.
Please explain in detail how you arrived at the conclusion that I'm advocating for a matriarchal social structure. Hilarious that you're demanding historical examples when you know they were all murdered by fragile men like you.
Ah yes, let's red herring with gender politics and sexism.
Seriously, this isn't productive, it's toxic, and belongs back on Reddit and back on the gate communities there.
Lemmy "progressives" would rather argue about social politics than actually solve problems. It's one of the far-rights greatest strengths, left-wing groups fragment at the drop of a pencil over the slightest disagreements
They were never aligned to begin with
You got me on the furry hater. I can't deny that one, but please translate that word spaghetti for those of us in the audience without brain damage.
It's due to all the propaganda BS everyone needs a fairness doctrine for media at this point
Which is hilarious because I look at PP and all I see is a weak man and yet that's what we will probably elect.
We won't elect PP. We will elect whoever isn't Mr.T.
PP isn't doing very well even for the conservatives but they will still vote for him and the swinger voters have already made up thier mind and switched to the CPC.
Why wouldn't you elect Mr. T? I would love to have BA Barakas leading my country
His main policy of "pity the fool" isn't great.
I think it's more "tech has created extremely reliable and granular methods to hijack a democracy". Pair that with wealth inequality, and you have a recipe for billionaires able to buy their way into becoming nobility without putting a target on their backs.
This wasn't some accident or an artifact - a small group of billionaires bought up the Western media over the last few decades, have run astroturfing operations to misrepresent public sentiment to lawmakers, and more recently have started to use social media to shape discourse. And I think we all know they do a whole lot more behind, but these are the things that are well documented publicly if you care to look
Humanity has plenty of cycles, but this was something done intentionally and systematically by a number of individuals that could fit in one room
Maybe if the leftwing was actually capable of doing something it would have some support.
The NDP got us national dental and doubled CERB payments, all while not even the opposition.
Also the NDP is the only party that wants to push public transit and better city design. Even if it isn't a federal mandate.
The liberals are also pushing for 15 minute city infrastructure.
The Liberals also pushed for election reform...
Which isn't a high priority.