Naomi Klein's "Doppelganger"

Tomorrow (September 6) at 7pm, I'll be hosting Naomi Klein at the LA Public Library for the launch of Doppelganger.

On September 12 at 7pm, I'll be at Toronto's Another Story Bookshop with my new book The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation.

If the Naomi be Klein you’re doing just fine If the Naomi be Wolf Oh, buddy. Ooooof.

I learned this rhyme in Doppelganger, Naomi Klein's indescribable semi-memoir that is (more or less) about the way that people confuse her with Naomi Wolf, and how that fact has taken on a new urgency as Wolf descended into conspiratorial politics, becoming a far-right darling and frequent Steve Bannon guest:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374610326/doppelganger

This is a very odd book. It is also a very, very good book. The premise – exploring the two Naomis' divergence – is a surprisingly sturdy scaffold for an ambitious, wide-ranging exploration of this very frightening moment of polycrisis and systemic failure:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lCjcwVhFhTA

Wolf once had a cluster of superficial political and personal similarities to Klein: a feminist author of real literary ability, a Jewish woman, and, of course, a Naomi. Klein grew accustomed to being mistaken for Wolf, but never fully comfortable. Wolf's politics were always more Sheryl Sandberg than bell hooks (or Emma Goldman). While Klein talked about capitalism and class and solidarity, Wolf wanted to "empower" individual women to thrive in a market system that would always produce millions of losers for every winner.

Fundamentally: Klein is a leftist, Wolf was a liberal. The classic leftist distinction goes: leftists want to abolish a system where 150 white men run the world; liberals want to replace half of those 150 with women, queers and people of color.

The past forty years have seen the rise and rise of a right wing politics that started out extreme (think of Reagan and Thatcher's support for Pinochet's death-squads) and only got worse. Liberals and leftists forged an uneasy alliance, with liberals in the lead (literally, in Canada, where today, Justin Trudeau's Liberal Party governs in partnership with the nominally left NDP).

But whenever real leftist transformation was possible, liberals threw in with conservatives: think of the smearing and defenestration of Corbyn by Labour's right, or of the LibDems coalition with David Cameron's Tories, or of the Democrats' dirty tricks to keep Bernie from appearing on the national ballot.

Lacking any kind of transformational agenda, the liberal answer to capitalism's problems always comes down to minor tweaks ("making sure half of our rulers are women, queers and people of color") rather than meaningful, structural shifts. This leaves liberals in the increasingly absurd position of defending the indefensible: insisting that the FDA shouldn't be questioned despite its ghastly failures during the opioid epidemic; claiming that the voting machine companies whose defective products have been the source of increasingly urgent technical criticism are without flaw; embracing the "intelligence community" as the guardians of the best version of America; cheerleading for deindustrialization while telling the workers it harmed with "learn to code"; demanding more intervention in speech by our monopolistic tech companies; and so on.

It's not like leftists ever stopped talking about the importance of transformation and not just reform. But as the junior partners in the progressive coalition, leftists have been drowned out by liberal reformers. In most of the world, if you are worried about falling wages, corporate capture of government, and scientific failures due to weak regulators, the "progressive" answer was to tell you it was all in your head, that you were an unhinged conspiratorialist:

https://doctorow.medium.com/the-swivel-eyed-loons-have-a-point-3434d7cbfae2

For Klein, it's this failure that the faux-populist right has exploited, redirecting legitimate anger and fear into racist, xenophobic, homophobic, sexist and transphobic rage. The deep-pocketed backers of the conservative movement didn't just find a method to get turkeys to vote for Christmas – progressives created the conditions that made that method possible.

If progressives answer pregnant peoples' concerns about vaccine risks – concerns rooted in the absolute failure of prenatal care – with dismissals, while conservatives accept those concerns and funnel them into conspiratorialism, then progressives' message becomes, "We are the movement of keeping things as they are," while conservatives become the movement of "things have to change." Think here of the 2016 liberal slogan, "America was already great," as an answer to the faux-populist rallying cry, "Make America great again."

When liberals get to define what it means to be "progressive," the fundamental, systemic critique is swept away. Conservatives – conservatives! – get to claim the revolutionary mantle, to insist that they alone are interested in root-and-branch transformation of society.

Like the two Naomis, conservatives and progressives become warped mirrors of one another. The progressive campaign for bodily autonomy is co-opted to be the foundation of the anti-vax movement. This is the mirror world, where concerns about real children – in border detention, or living in poverty in America – are reflected back as warped fever-swamp hallucinations about kids in imaginary pizza restaurant basements and Hollywood blood sacrifice rituals. The mirror world replaces RBG with Amy Coney-Barrett and calls it a victory for women. The mirror world defends workers by stoking xenophobic fears about immigrants.

But progressives let it happen. Progressives cede anti-surveillance to conservatives, defending reverse warrants when they're used to enumerate Jan 6 insurrectionists (nevermind that these warrants are mostly used to round up BLM demonstrators). Progressives cede suspicion of large corporations to conservatives, defending giant, exploitative, monopolistic corporations so long as they arouse conservative ire with some performative DEI key-jingling. Progressives defend the CIA and FBI when they're wrongfooting Trump, and voting machine vendors when they're turned into props for the Big Lie.

These issues are transformed in the mirror world: from grave concerns about real things, into unhinged conspiracies about imaginary things. Urgent environmental concerns are turned into a pretense to ban offshore wind turbines ("to protect the birds"). Worry about gender equality is transformed into seminars about women's representation in US drone-killing squads.

For Klein, the transformation of Wolf from liberal icon – Democratic Party consultant and Lean-In-type feminist icon – to rifle-toting Trumpling with a regular spot on the Steve Bannon Power Hour is an entrypoint to understanding the mirror world. How did so many hippie-granola yoga types turn into vicious eugenicists whose answer to "wear a mask to protect the immunocompromised" is "they should die"?

The PastelQ phenomenon – the holistic medicine and "clean eating" to QAnon pipeline – recalls the Nazi obsession with physical fitness, outdoor activities and "natural" living. The neoliberal transformation of health from a collective endeavor – dependent on environmental regulation, sanitation, and public medicine – into a private one, built entirely on "personal choices," leads inexorably to eugenics.

Once you start looking for the mirror world, you see it everywhere. AI chatbots are mirrors of experts, only instead of giving you informed opinions, they plagiarize sentence-fragments into statistically plausible paragraphs. Brands are the mirror-world version of quality, a symbol that isn't a mark of reliability, but a mark of a mark, a sign pointing at nothing. Your own brand – something we're increasingly expected to have – is the mirror world image of you.

The mirror world's overwhelming motif is "I know you are, but what am I?" As in, "Oh, you're a socialist? Well, you know that 'Nazi' stands for 'National Socialist, right?" (and inevitably, this comes from someone who obsesses over the 'Great Replacement' and considers themself a 'race realist').

This isn't serious politics, but it is seriously important. "Antisemitism is the socialism of fools," its obsession with "international bankers" the mirror-world version of the real and present danger from big finance and private equity wreckers. And, as Klein discusses with great nuance and power, the antisemitism discussion is eroded from both sides: both by antisemites, and by doctrinaire Zionists who insist that any criticism of Israel is always and ever antisemetic.

As a Jew in solidarity with Palestinians, I found this section of the book especially good – thoughtful and vigorous, pulling no punches and still capturing the discomfort aroused by this deliberately poisoned debate.

This thoughtful, vigorous prose and argumentation deserves its own special callout here: Klein has produced a first-rate literary work just as much as this is a superb philosophical and political tome. In this moment where the mirror world is exploding and the real world is contracting, this is an essential read.

I'll be Klein's interlocutor tomorrow night (Sept 6) at the LA launch for Doppelganger. We'll be appearing at 7PM at the @LAPublicLibrary:

https://lafl.org/ALOUD

Livestreaming at:

https://youtube.com/live/jIoAh-jxb2k

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/05/not-that-naomi/#if-the-naomi-be-klein-youre-doing-just-fine

I had a sudden insight this morning

I was thinking about how the archetypal prison break of my generation (Millennial) is The Shawshank Redemption in which the hero is an innocent who escapes from a horrible jail, but there is nonetheless an implication that most everyone else there may, in some way, deserve to be there, and Andy ultimately escapes on his own.

Contrast that to what I hope will be the archetypal prison break of the next generation, episode 8-10 of Andor, in which the show never interrogates why any of the other prisoners are there, even the innocent Cassian is technically a murderer and a bandit, but the place itself is bad so it doesn't matter and Cassian tries to get everyone out.

I think the liberal tendency is to universalize the individual and personify the collective, and hyperbolize on both ends without actually changing anything about the status quo.

that’s how they wind up with asinine takes like “misgendering is bad therefore people should be put in jail for it” and “companies are made up of people ergo companies as a whole should have the same rights as any individual.”

it lets them feel revolutionary and pat themselves on the back without doing any real footwork.

My aunt unironically said that people upset about roe v wade should just vote and I am losing my mind

hey! if you have the spoons, would you happen to have any posts/anecdotes refuting this thread? https://www.tumblr.com/neondyke/719263498717233152/nonhoration?source=share

so. one of my big problems with how we talk about TERFs is the sort of conspiratorial energy some people have towards them- not in that TERFs don't lie about their beliefs, but the idea that all radical feminists are part of this huge conspiracy where none of them actually believe any of what they say. The idea that no TERF actually, genuinely cares about women, or gender non-conforming people- or that none of them hate men.

Just because TERFism is misogynistic, harmful to GNC people, and often allies with conservative men, does not mean every TERF hates other women, GNC people, and likes men. Its vital to be critical of what TERFs say vs what their actions say- but we do ourselves and them a disservice by shoving our fingers in our ears and essentially saying that no TERF can be genuine, and I actually know what they really believe in their hearts. This is especially important when you aren't interacting with high-level TERFs (especially those making bank off public appearances & books & shit), but like. regular smegular everyday women who got radicalized, or people who are on the verge of being radicalized and are put-off by people who seem to be incapable of seeing TERFs as having genuine beliefs.

I say that all because the idea that TERFs aren't misandrists, that they don't really hate men, is just straight-up ridiculous. It assumes that radical feminism was born exclusively as a reaction to trans women, that none of its theorists or activists were genuinely trying to apply Marxist analysis to gender/sex dynamics and create a better world for women. Which ignores other parts of radical feminism, like their anti-sex work rhetoric/whorephobia. (If you have access to JSTOR, I recommend reading "Radical Feminism and Feminist Radicalism" by Ellen Willis, a former radfem; it dives into the problems with 60s radical feminism from an inside perspective).

I absolutely think TERF hatred for trans women is not exclusively a result of their misandry. This is because all transphobia is systematic, and everyone born and raised in transphobic society has transphobia woven into their thinking. So if you are a cis woman, probably one who has had traumatic experiences with misogyny coming from cis men- probably one with some interest in leftism, who is annoyed by liberal #girlboss feminism which feels lackluster, who is envious of the subversive, direct-action, "tear the system down" feminism of the past- and you have an unexamined, ingrained bias against trans people, well. TERFism will provide explanation and affirmation for your trauma and the promise of the radical feminist action of your dreams to allow you to lash out at your oppressors with the logic of the guillotine. Your unexamined bias against trans women will mean you don't see their transmisogyny as unreasonable, and even if you never really thought about trans women before, its gonna be real easy for you to accept them as a threat to Real Women.

But to assume that every time a TERF says "men" or "male," she means "trans woman," is just ignorant. TERFs are surrounded by cis men, because they live in the same society as us. They see cis men acting misogynistic, many of them have been personally hurt by cis men, they very much mean "cis men" when they say things like "all men should be castrated" or "all male babies should be aborted"- how exactly can you talk about males as a sex and never refer to cis men? When they talk about how using dildos or any sort of penetrative sex is patriarchal and Bad, that's not because they hate trans women, its because they see anything that could be associated with maleness as bad.

Here's a quote from Sylvia Riveria's very important work "Queens in Exile, The Forgotten Ones":

"Oh, yeah, we mixed with lesbians. We always got along back then. All the division between lesbian women and queens came after 1974 when Jean O'Leary and the radical lesbians came up. The radicals did not accept us or masculine-looking women who dressed like men. And those lesbian women might not even have been trans."

TERF hatred for transmasculinity goes back far before ROGD and the idea of transmasculinity as a social disease affecting "innocent young girls." Here's a quote from Leslie Feinberg's Transgender Warriors:

"A view that the primary division of society is between women and men leads some women to fear that transsexual women are men in sheep's clothing coming across their border, or that female-to-male transsexuals are going over to the enemy, or that I look the same as the enemy."

If TERFs have no real hatred for men or masculinity, why did/do they attack butches & transmascs? Why, before ROGD was the trendy way to attack transmasculinity, did they specifically attack us for being too masculine and therefore imitating the oppressor? The idea that trans women are the only ones blamed by TERFs for ROGD is also false- adult trans men, especially those with any public influence, are frequently blamed for "preying" on young "girls." (Also, fun fact: that last quoted paragraph ends with: "Trans people of all sexes and genders are not oppressors: they, like women, rank among the oppressed.")

Lastly, I feel like we- all trans people- have an issue of trying to match our genders & the way our genders do impact how we are treated, with the way our sexual/gendered misgendering also impacts how we are treated. For example, I am often frustrated by trans men who are resistant to talking about how trans men face misogyny because "it feels like misgendering." I don't think we can really deal with transphobia unless we cope with the fact that we are trans people- we are socially placed between genders and punished for that, and that means that we will be attacked because of our relationship to our gender assigned at birth (although not exclusively). See this post for more of my thoughts on that.

Obligatory "please don't harass any of the people in the screenshot above, just block them & move on" notice

Like sure you call yourself a Leftist because you like the anarchist flag & support trans rights but have you actually read political theory? Do you actually understand what “capitalism” is and why it’s bad, not just that it’s bad? Do you know the economics of communism and not just “sexy catgirl commune”? Do you understand imperialism and indigenous issues and prison abolition? Do you know what direct action and praxis are? Have you educated yourself about current global issues from a leftist perspective? Do you support decolonization as a necessary element if deconstructing capitalism & imperialism? Do you understand the relationship between capitalism & colonialism? Do you know what “liberalism” is and not just the americanized democrat vs republican definition of it? Have you read anything by Marx? Is leftism more to you than just being socially progressive / vaguely liberal by american standards? Is “leftism” just a label you ascribe to yourself to signal “I’m a good person” or is it a sincere set of beliefs you hold about the most efficient and humane way for the economy to function?

You've been ignoring my posts about economic justice and suffering. Debate me coward. How does the flavor of leftism or whatever that you pursue make choices about how to emphasize absolute wealth vs relative wealth? How morally important or relevant is inequality really, to you?

There are two intertwining reasons why I've been avoiding engaging - the first is that as of late I've felt a little bit ideologically homeless, like I'm some sort of weird breed of market socialist with a strong aversion to most of the political theory I've read.

The second reason is that I am increasingly convinced that the term "capitalism" obscures far more than it clarifies, and it leads people to spend a lot of time trying to put together ideological constructions to answer their political questions instead of digging into history.

Leftists are bad about this, but so are liberals and reactionaries - basically the entire political spectrum spends a lot of time coming up with elaborate models of how the world works and very little time seeking out knowledge that would improve (or often, invalidate) said models.

And like, I still think the leftists are more correct than anyone else. Or at least the socialists are. But I'm less confident than I was a couple of years ago. I'm less confident about everything relating to the big picture.

To that end, I don't really want to talk in too-broad generalities if I can avoid it. Still, let me (finally) try to answer your questions.

I don't really care about fairness as a terminal value. Or rather, I think it would be nice, but it's low on my list of priorities. What I care about is not so much relative wealth or absolute wealth, but rather the floor - how does society treat its most vulnerable? How much can we guarantee to everyone? I think there is an acceptable minimum standard there that all societies fall below irrespective of their absolute wealth, and I don't think "capitalism" (meaning: the concepts that word tends to refer to) does a very good job at improving this.

Well, you've baited an overgeneral ideological statement out of me - I would say everything in that last paragraph is a bit wishy-washy for my taste, and you should ask me about specific things to get better answers. But that's my answer and I'll stand by it, until I come up with a better one.

“Voters need to understand the fundamental differences between liberalism and leftism. It’s the difference between a candidate who believes capitalism, with just a little refereeing, will eventually provide what working people need, versus a candidate who believes serious intervention in the capitalist economy is necessary.” - leftist vs liberal

This day in history

Tonight (May 23) at 8PM, I’ll be in TORONTO for a book launch for Red Team Blues that’s part of WEPFest, a benefit for the West End Phoenix, onstage with Dave Bidini (The Rheostatics), Ron Diebert (Citizen Lab) and the whistleblower Dr Nancy Olivieri.

#20yrsago “Facts” about printing and book-design https://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/002638.html

#15yrsago Former RIAA CEO is the Huffington Post’s new political director https://www.wired.com/2008/05/the-huffington/

#15yrsago Canadian spooks think punk band “Suicide Pilots” are terrorists https://web.archive.org/web/20080530022051/https://canadiandimension.com/blog/2008/05/csis-spying-on-canadian-punk-band/

#15yrsago Punk House: communal homes of the anarcho-syndicalist lifestyle https://web.archive.org/web/20080526172905/http://www.alarmpress.com/2293/book-reviews/punk-house-interiors-in-anarchy/

#10yrsago Laptop with thermite self-destruct mechanism https://hackaday.com/2013/05/23/laptop-vs-thermite-slow-motion-destruction/

#10yrsago 3D-printable model of the cover of Joy Division’s “Unknown Pleasures” https://web.archive.org/web/20130607163848/http://i.document.m05.de/2013/05/23/joy-divisions-unknown-pleasures-printed-in-3d/

#10yrsago Game designer creates a never-played-by-humans titanium boardgame and buries it for play 2700 years from now https://www.polygon.com/2013/3/28/4157884/game-designer-jason-rohrer-designs-a-game-meant-to-be-played-2000

#10yrsago Hardwood Escher tesselated interlocking lizard tiles https://evolulignum.blogspot.com/2011/02/diseno-geometrico-inspiracion-escher.html

#5yrsago Comcast’s $1.2b/year modem-rental scam picks your pocket, then exposes you to hackers, stalkers and identity thieves https://www.vice.com/en/article/mbkgn8/dont-rent-a-modem-from-comcast

#5yrsago Cable industry attains the impossible: makes Americans hate it even more https://www.vice.com/en/article/7xmxza/america-hates-comcast-more-than-ever

#5yrsago Mining the Panama Papers and other leaks to reveal the hidden looting of West Africa by its corrupt elite https://www.icij.org/investigations/west-africa-leaks/

#5yrsago Why “leftism” is parting ways with “liberalism” and what it means for the future of American politics https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/05/americas-brand-of-capitalism-is-incompatible-with-democracy.html

#5yrsago Debugging AI is a “hard problem” https://ai.stanford.edu/~zayd/why-is-machine-learning-hard.html

#5yrsago FBI sinkholes a key domain used by the malware that infected 500,000 home routers, declares partial victory and Russian attribution https://www.thedailybeast.com/exclusive-fbi-seizes-control-of-russian-botnet

#5yrsago Thoughtful, devastating critique of Jordan Peterson’s “12 Rules for Life” https://web.archive.org/web/20210310135608/https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/jordan-peterson-12-rules-kate-manne-review/

#1yrago HSBC: “Who cares if Miami is underwater?” https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/24/moral-money/#nutjobs-warning-about-the-end-of-the-world

Catch me on tour with Red Team Blues in Toronto, Oxford, Hay, Manchester, Nottingham, London, and Berlin!

“Liberals stand up for victims of oppression and exclusion. They fight to break down arbitrary barriers(such as those based on race, and more recently on sexual orientation.) But their zeal to help victims, combined with their low scores on the Loyalty, Authority, and Sanctity foundations, often lead them to push for changes that weaken groups, traditions, institutions, and moral capital. For example, the urge to help the inner city poor led to welfare programs in the 1960s that reduced the value of marriage, increased out of wedlock births, and weakened African American families. The urge to empower students by giving them the right to sue their teachers and schools in the 1970s had eroded authority and moral capital in schools, creating disorderly environments that harm the poor above all. The urge to help Hispanic immigrants in the 1980s, led to multicultural education programs that emphasized the differences among Americans rather than shared values and identity. Emphasizing differences makes many people more racist , not less. On issue after issue, it’s a though liberals are trying to help a subset of bees(which rarely does not help) even if doing so damages the hive. Such reforms may lower the overall welfare of a society, and sometimes they even hurt the very victims liberals were trying to help.” -Jonathan Haidt. Chapter 12 of The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion.

Ah! Phew! I was concerned that the constant presence of inequality and scarcity throughout the entirety of the history of capitalism meant that they were conditions of capitalism, but my centrist friend just assured me that they’re the isolated results of a handful of bad actors <3 

It’s funny because I would actually describe my political views as pretty radical. However I don’t talk about it much online because the way it seems to be normal to talk about these things online is just utterly noxious to me. Sorry to use an old fashioned word but it fits the best. Like, physically repellant. The first thing is the very black and white thinking, it triggers a part of my brain (that maybe is the OCD or maybe the Evangelical church or a toxic combination of both) that causes me to emotionally seize up almost immediately.

Then there is the endless belittling of anyone who slightly disagrees or you just don’t like. It’s all funny online shit and memes I guess but to me it’s so toxic. It says to me ‘if you become friendly with us, this will be you if you even slightly step out of line’. Or if it’s not belittling, it’s the refusal to interpret anything other than in the absolute extreme it can possibly be, like a few weeks ago when someone told me anonymously that I must be a nationalist defender because I said it’s not nationalism for Biden to address the American people and express hope for a better US after the Capitol Hill riots. I’m not even American but I don’t feel I was wrong to say that, like, I’m so glad some people can survive on a diet of endless unadulterated misery and pessimism but as I may have expressed before, that would kill me! (Or even if the sentiment doesn’t work for you personally 1. he was addressing  an entire, gigantic country, and 2. you are still jumping to the worst possible and most extreme conclusion about what he is saying. What is the benefit here?) Meanwhile, all the funny online shit and guilletine memes goes on and on. We all tweet rat emojis at the gay politician, it’s so funny and no one has a problem with it (because we will nudge them out of our cliche if they do), and the actual specifics of what we want and what we are trying to do, to be, as leftists, are never fucking talked about! I’m going to assume in good faith that some of the people talk about it with their irl organising groups but many people are not in a place they can meet with fellow leftists on their doorstep (i.e. me) and they came online to try and learn more that way, and this is what they got. What I think I find most difficult is how easily misinformation spreads through a kind of exaggeration, that cannot be corrected because if you do you look like you are defending the action being talked about. It always goes like: ‘X politician did this really bad, awful thing!’ ‘Actually, this is misinformation. What he did was this slightly less bad thing.’ ‘Oh, I suppose you think slightly less bad thing is ok then??!!’ Like, there’s not much argument with that, is there? The 2nd person really does look like they are defending the slightly less bad thing, even if their intention was just to correct misinformation, because of a quirk of how arguments work. What I rarely see talked about is why on earth is the 1st person putting out exaggerations like this, which you often see happening over and over again in political online spaces, and should they be held accountable for that? If slightly less bad thing is very bad, surely it will stand on its own if described accurately and not exaggerated? The worst part I think is how at some point online leftists seem to have decided all discussion of racism is meaningless idpol?! Like, I fully support the movement to root out TERFish ideology in lefty online spaces, but for gods sake why is there not a similar one to boot out this kind of quasi-racists in leftism? I think it’s because it spoils the fun if someone actually says ‘that joke about a person of colour who is in power doesn’t hit the same as it does about a white person, in fact it is offensive, even if that person of colour is in a position of power. If you are white maybe avoid that kind of joke towards ANY person of colour’. I have no idea how this shift happened, I understand a lot of anti-racism blogs on here went inactive when a lot of blogs did during the drop-off in users, but that was more of a reaction to the changing userbase than the cause of it. I’ve been here a long time and it has changed so much, the way people talk about racism, it’s like people think it barely matters in their leftist ideology now. Wtf?? For the above reasons I really feel that tumblr is no longer a good place for political stuff (and twitter definitely isn’t x10000000), leftist meme culture in general is very frustrating for me on any platform (e.g. my facebook feed during the last general election) and I think the best idea for me to learn and grow at this point is to get back to the primary texts these people are doing a very bastardised version of and work from there. It’s hard because part of me kind of believes that the only reason I think this is because the truth is I really am the very essence of the liberal they all hate. But that isn’t reflected in my politics at all! So what does it even mean?

Right VS Left

The big difference between the right and left are values. The right values the economy above all else, while the left values the living conditions of the average American. It's probably the main reason why the two can't understand where the other is coming from.

This leads to good and bad things. The right cares way more about the destruction of buildings than lives, but the left wants to fund expensive things without knowing how to do so. Both are important, but I personally care more about the living conditions and minimum wages.

Take covid for instance: The left is way more upset about the death toll and how people of the lower class are affected more, while the right cares way more about how the economy has crumbled due to us shutting everything down out of safety.

There's also the issue of the right wanting to take America back to a time that never existed, while the left wants America to be a different country entirely. It makes it so neither of these groups know what America truly is. Then again, what even if America at this point?

This came from discussions with my friend. He's a moderate (if not ever so leaning right) while I'm basically a socialist, so it was interesting hearing how how different values constructed our arguments. Do I agree with him on things? No, but I see where he comes from now. It helps that he's also pretty pragmatic and not a douche.

DEAR DESTINY...Capitalism CAN'T Be Reformed

Good video by Mad Blender. I have thought this for the past two years and I have said this for the past year. I think it was Captain Andy who said, "Liberals don't want to Reform CisHetro Patriarchial Ableist White Supremacy. So why is it they want to just 'Reform' Capitalism as opposed to getting rid of it?"

Hey, were you being a troll with your commentary on automatic registration for voting or do you genuinely believe people shouldn't be automatically registered to vote?

My only concern with actual automatic voter registration is that I'm a protected voter and you have to register in a special way so your address and name don't appear anywhere. It's what we abuse survivors do. So if we had a system that automatically registered people, I don't know how someone would keep their identity private. Perhaps doing something prior to their 18th birthday, like a form or something? I don't know.

Otherwise I don't really care but I wasn't trolling about mandatory voting because I think laws are immoral. Okay thanks bye.