Welcome to the cool/correct side of the pillow friends.

Yes, I agree with all of that. Which goes back to your previous assertion that politicians can't afford to take a stance against corporate interests because that would get them voted out after the donor class showers their opponent in donations. Corporate or billionaire donations have decreased in influence due to crowdfunding, and stopping left-leaning politicians dead in their tracks in this fashion is not the only reason for corporate rule anyway.


You've also neatly touched upon one of the reasons why I'm paying so much attention to American politics (besides boredom): the U.S. are still the political and cultural trendsetter for the entire Western world. Every fucked up trend emerging in America will sooner rather than later make its way across the Atlantic and fuck things up here as well. Be it the abandoning of "labor politics" by the New Left during the 70s, the Reaganite trickle down economics of the 80s, the globalist free trade craze of the 90s, the erosion of civil liberties and neocon warmongering of the 2000s or the wokeism and cancel culture of the 2010s - all this shit affects us in Europe too and the sooner these trends and movements are defeated, the better.

If you really want those trends defeated you should actually want to stop the ones pushing them. Hint: It's not Democrats. Democrats have been following the Republican lead for decades, and have only recently started pushing a bit to the left economically. Based on your professed beliefs you should be behind this, but for some reason that nobody (everybody) can figure out you don't rally behind them.

You spend an inordinate amount of time attacking the left because of fringe issues and actively ignore the things that you *say* are important to you.

This post was edited by NetflixAdaptationWidow on Mar 22 2022 07:01am

I was preferring Democrats for most of this timeframe, until after 2012, lol. Even in 2016, I liked Bernie and his message. No idea who I would have rooted for if that election had ended up being Bernie vs Trump.
My partisan "allegiance" has only shifted around the 2014-2016 range, when both parties and their coalitions underwent significant change. In recent years, Democrats have the fundraising edge, upscale suburbs are increasingly shifting from Republicans to Democrats while working-class voters of all skin colors are increasingly shifting toward the GOP, corporate America is increasingly aligning themselves with Democrats, the corporate media is becoming ever more pro-Democrat and no longer even tries to hide it, and so on and forth.


I'll happily vote for parties or politicians who propose policies that redistribute wealth from the rich and corporations (rather than the middle class!!!!) and who don't talk all time about how I'm responsible for everything bad in this world because I'm a white man, or how they're coming to take away my privilege and freedoms. Unfortunately, there is no such party and all political movements going in this direction are in their infancy, plagued by incompetent leadership and hammered by the mainstream media.

This post was edited by Black XistenZ on Mar 22 2022 07:21am

The fact that you have no idea who you would have voted for in that matchup demonstrates exactly what I was saying. In that matchup there's one person with a track record of fighting for the exact things you claim to want. There is no "I don't know who I would have rooted for" if you actually care about the things you claim to care about.



This is what you actually care about. The culture war stuff that rich people use to distract you from the actual issues. You are easily manipulated. It's really that simple. You fell hook like and sinker for the bullshit CRT narrative without a second thought, and pretty much fall into every culture war trap that is brought up. The fact that you think you are using the language of being blamed for being white is testament to that as well.

This post was edited by NetflixAdaptationWidow on Mar 22 2022 07:50am

I never claimed that economic policies which help the middle and working class are my lone or top policy priority.



We've had this debate so many times now, I'm sick and tired of rehashing it. Where we disagree is whether culture wars, identity politics and all this stuff actually has tangible real-world effects or if it is all just completely made up bullshit that won't negatively affect anyone if left unchecked. And yes, of course it's a wedge issue that's being used by the powers that be, do you think I'm a complete idiot to not see that?


In earlier decades, religion and social conservatism was used to divide the secular, labor-leaning members of the white working-class from the religious ones. That's the right-wing identity politics and cancel culture that you love to complain about - rightfully! In more recent years, however, the predominant wedge issue was shifted ('was', not 'has'!) to racial and cultural issues to divide people along racial and geographic lines; we got liberal identiy politics and cancel culture from left-leaning institutions. You're still completely discounting this more recent development because it would go against your worldview and complicate things. The way I see it, whites/men/the Western middle class are deliberately put on the defense by liberal identity politics, by globalism and by statism. This stuff is threatening to reduce our share of the economic and social pie, so to speak. It needs to be fought back before "we" can go on the offense against the ruling class and successfully claim a larger share of the pie.



From my perspective, you are the one who doesn't see how he's getting played, who doesn't see how the ruling class has switched the vehicle for its divide and conquer tactics post-Great Recession from conservatism to liberalism. We're in the middle of a big ideological and political realignment, with mainstream liberal parties becoming the best allies of corporate interests and conservative parties increasingly absorbing the anti-establishment and working-class elements which have become politically homeless in the process. Meanwhile, there are still strong elements of mainstream, pro-establishment, pro-corporate conservatism while this new flavor of populist or anti-establishment right-wing politics hasn't truly found its identity yet, so the political right is weak, divided and occupied with internal struggles for dominance right now. See the fight between the Cheney/Romney wing of the GOP with the Trumpist wing, see the fight of European mainstream conservative parties with upstart populist parties.

All in all, you come across like someone who's politically stuck somewhere between 2006 and 2012 and refuses to acknowledge that the political world has gradually but steadily moved on since then.

This post was edited by Black XistenZ on Mar 22 2022 09:04am

Except it isn't the liberals dividing people on those lines. It is very explicitly the conservatives. The guy who popularized the CRT issue literally said that was his goal. He flat out said his goal was to brand racial conversation as evil.

You are trying to pretend that liberals are the ones dividing people when conservatives literally state that is their goal outright. Stop creating a boogeyman when the real bad guys are literally just telling you their goals.

This post was edited by NetflixAdaptationWidow on Mar 22 2022 09:30am

What specifically are you referring to?

Of course the ones promoting CRT were corporate-funded think tanks and journalists on mainstream media outlets, not conservatives. That some conservative figure decided to tap into CRT as a political issue after the fact doesn't mean that he was the one who originally came up with CRT (that was left-wing ideologues in academia) nor the one who originally pushed it into the mainstream of the political discourse. It is also not the fault of conservatives that CRT's core tenets started increasingly seeping into curricula. Similarly, the widespread unease about concepts like CRT, BLM, defund the police and those things wasn't created by some evil right-wing mastermind out of thin air. The right-wing political strategist or journalist that you seem to be referring to only used feelings and energy which already existed.

It's always the same with liberals: first, they promote a toxic, divisive agenda (like e.g. encouraging school children to view society through an oppressor-oppressed lens), then they brand anyone who's pushing back against this agenda as racist/sexist/classist or as an uneducated propaganda victim.




Also, let's not pretend like Democrats and their allies didn't exploit the George Floyd protests for political gain. Their reaction, as well as the one-sided and sensational coverage by their allies in the MSM, deliberately stoked the flames of racial tension to drive black turnout and to accelerate the trend of upscale white suburbanites away from Trump/the GOP.

This post was edited by Black XistenZ on Mar 22 2022 12:36pm

99% of right wingers found out what CRT was, and that it was an "issue", from fox news or another right winged outlet.