Liberal smugness will destroy the left (please read this OP)

hydrophilic attack said:

What I'm trying to say is that in western Europe, those attitudes you are describing are more common among voters for pro-EU social democratic parties than among voters for anti-EU hard left parties. This is why the bubble for social democratic parties in my chart spreads farther into the upper left quadrant than the bubble for hard left parties does

Again, UK doesn't have separate social democratic and hard left parties

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Citations needed on that claim. Claiming that anti-EU parties are more socially liberal than pro-EU ones seems completely ridiculous to me.

The UK/US doesn't have separate parties, but the types of voters bleeding over to the conservative parties are showing the same tendencies (rural, no college education, majority ethnic group) and those "populist" tendencies would seem to be much more aligned with the anti-EU viewpoints than the mainstream pro-EU ones.

people vote against their self interests, are ignorant (at best) or stupid (at worst), and you do, in fact, know better than them. ive accepted this.

LegendofLex said:

History has taught us that this means we never actually address racial inequality and the benefits of class-based relief continue to disproportionately go to white people.

So please forgive me if I dismiss it out of hand as white supremacy in progressive clothing.

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Well if that's the case then I don't know what else to do other than wait for Republicans to just die of old age. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

tbh I don't believe these people are stupid or ignorant, I think they know exactly what they are doing and have as much political agency as anyone else.

That I don't judge favorably their "fuck you got mine" attitudes is precisely because I believe they're free to choose to be that way.

That was one hell of a smug article btw.

Angry Grimace said:

Well yeah. Part of the problem is that liberal extremists get caught in feedback loops online where they convince themselves they're not extremists and then label moderate or centrist liberals as Untrue Scotsmen.

We had a thread like 2 days ago where people were labeling everyone to their right as supporters of fascism.

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Another part of the problem is the left in the US is so fucked that a regular leftist in any decent 1st world country is seen as an extremist

rstzkpf said:

Well if that's the case then I don't know what else to do other than wait for Republicans to just die of old age. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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48% of the 18-26 vote in 2016 went to Republicans

Dirt McGirt said:

Right wingers are full of shit.

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I don't think he's a right-winger as I mentioned in this post here: #188

He's just a very pro-Brexit user who hates the EU.

Kirblar said:

Other articles from this guy:

Why has secularism got religion in its sights?
Why you can't rely on the news media to understand… the religious
Free minds: Rod Dreher – an American conservative who realised liberalism was the enemy
The oppressive individualism of human rights
Liberalism has broken us – we need a new party to call Home

:thinkingemoji:

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Gotta love an OP who just dumps propaganda and leaves.

rstzkpf said:

Well if that's the case then I don't know what else to do other than wait for Republicans to just die of old age. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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America becoming less white is an existential threat to the GOP's curent existence and the GOP is reacting as such.

Psychoward said:

48% of the 18-26 vote in 2016 went to Republicans

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Well then what do you suggest?

Kirblar said:

America becoming less white is an existential threat to the GOP's curent existence and the GOP is reacting as such.

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Well then it seems to me that if we really want to destroy the GOP we need to find a way to make white people either not vote for them or vote for us instead.

Okay.

He started his campaign by calling Mexicans rapists.
He supported a Muslim ban
He's tough on crime and wants to give cops more power (which means, more harassment for black people)\
He supported jailing women who had an abortion
He opposed Obamacare and didn't think of a better and more public solution
He admitted to sexually assaulting women
He called his supporters dumb and cultists. In front of their faces
He suggested no plan for the economy during the campaign.

And we STILL have people say they supported him because the Democrats are elitists?

He's screwing his base over now. Some of them knows the tariffs are gonna fuck them in the ass and yet they STILL support him. He won the white women vote despite his victims being mostly, if not all, white women

The only economic anxiety Trump voters have is "The brown man is gonna steal my job!"

republicans calling me a degenerate because of my gender identity is only going to push me farther left :(

NoName999 said:

1) Why be sympathetic to hateful bigots who wants to see anyone not like them gone?

2) Way to imply that liberals can not be poor?

3) No one's looking down on them because they're uneducated and poor.

Bloody hell can some of you just admit that you want gays and people of color to stop "whining" already?

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1)Because not being sympathetic to hateful bigots means you wouldn't care about like 99% of the people that has ever lived (According to our standards), should we not care about Africa and the middle east? Since that region is host to some of the most hateful people around, are we gonna turn around the ships if it turns out the migrants dont like gay people?

2)Liberals can be poor, and in that case you see all the compassion in the world, but if they vote red is basically their fault they are poor.

3)It's not like i have specific examples, but they do come on, people usually use the word uneducated to mean stupid and seem to be happy when bad things happen to them.

And i dont wan't gay people nor people of color to stop complaining, i don't know where would you get that, it's not like i think this people ideas are "right" but i definitely find jarring to see the left mocking poor and uneducated people and not caring for them.

Brian McDoogle said:

I don't think he's a right-winger as I mentioned in this post here: #188

He's just a very pro-Brexit user who hates the EU.

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Oh. I have to apologise then. But not to the op. If he wants the EU to fail, that affects me negatively and in an inhumane way. So he can go fuck himself.

rstzkpf said:

Well then what do you suggest?

Well then it seems to me that if we really want to destroy the GOP we need to find a way to make white people either not vote for them or vote for us instead.

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I was just correcting the falsehood that Republicans are pretty much all old people

Kirblar said:

America becoming less white is an existential threat to the GOP's curent existence and the GOP is reacting as such.

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Amazing how things would be different if GOP brought in Hispanics like Bush was doing.

It's really weird that OP specified to read the OP and article when it's the same exact shit right/centrist pundits spit out on a weekly basis about the left

Psychoward said:

I was just correcting the falsehood that Republicans are pretty much all old people

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While it's true that they aren't all old people, old people are as a group one of their most dependable constituents.

Brian McDoogle said:

Amazing how things would be different if GOP brought in Hispanics like Bush was doing.

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They made a deal with the devil going after the Trump wave and now it's coming due. They basically killed their party for a generation.

Angry Grimace said:

Well yeah. Part of the problem is that liberal extremists get caught in feedback loops online where they convince themselves they're not extremists and then label moderate or centrist liberals as Untrue Scotsmen.

We had a thread like 2 days ago where people were labeling everyone to their right as supporters of fascism.

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What is a liberal extremist supposed to even mean?

I feel pretty good about not being a bigoted piece of shit.

Here's a pro tip, never pander to scum.

Psychoward said:

Another part of the problem is the left in the US is so fucked that a regular leftist in any decent 1st world country is seen as an extremist

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That isn't actually true. And it's not "seen" as an extremist: if you describe a member of your own political faction as a Nazi Sympathizer you're an extremist.

Oheao said:

What is a liberal extremist supposed to even mean?

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In the US someone who wants a higher minimum wage and single payer healthcare lol

Unless the person you quoted thinks the extremist left actually has any sway in Ameirca which is just lmfwo

Brian McDoogle said:

I don't think he's a right-winger as I mentioned in this post here: #188

He's just a very pro-Brexit user who hates the EU.

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Lol, thread makes sense now.
Guess when you're just constantly losing due to your own stupidity you become so bitter you need stuff like this to keep going.

It reminds me of this article on this article in The Guardian (now 18 months old) that has really stuck with me:

One blunt heckler has revealed just how much the UK economy is failing us

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A booming Britain? Whose GDP do we mean, when the wealth gains of the past decade have all been in London and the south-east?

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There's a lady I've been thinking about for the past few days, even though we've never met. She's the central character in a true story told by the Europe expert Anand Menon. He was in Newcastle just before the referendum to debate the impact of Britain leaving the EU. Invoking the gods of economics, the King's College London professor invited the audience to imagine the likely plunge in the UK's GDP. Back yelled the woman: "That's your bloody GDP. Not ours."

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None of this stacks up, for exactly the reason identified by that geordie heckler. The economic crisis and the crisis in economics aren't about technicalities. They are about whose economy, whose recovery and whose GDP the social scientists and journalists are discussing. Nearly a decade after the crash, and nearly four decades into the devastation of Britain's industrial towns and cities, the UK has become so unequal that it can no longer be talked about as one unitary economy.

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When I first read that woman's comment, it reminded me of something I've picked up in my reporting during the past half-decade. Even while David Cameron and George Osborne were boasting on camera of a record-breaking recovery, on the road I noticed two things: hardly anyone I spoke to outside London and the south-east believed that there was any such recovery; and hardly anyone I interviewed within the M25 believed the recovery was based on much more than house prices and debt. Whatever else we might talk about, those two themes were constant.

Mention recovery in Newport and locals would laugh at you. Mention it in north London and most people would add a seasoning of scepticism, or a jibe about estate agents. But in neither place did people believe the recovery was real – or that it included them.

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In her riposte to the professor, therefore, the woman in Newcastle was absolutely right. On statistical aggregates the UK is enjoying a recovery. But in reality this has been a recovery for owner-occupiers in London and the south-east. It has locked out those without big assets, such as the young, and those renting in the capital. It has penalised the poor. And it has impoverished those who have been forced on to zero hours or bogus self-employment.

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The end result is that the recovery constantly boasted about by the Tories was so partial, so patchy and so dedicated to putting money in the pockets of the already wealthy that it makes a mockery of Theresa May's speechifying this week about a "shared society". As the Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change argues, it also renders any discussion of unitary issues such as GDP or jobs almost meaningless.

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https://www.theguardian.com/comment...nomists-failing-us-booming-britain-gdp-london

When the status quo is so shit and is literally making people poorer while those in power are perfectly happy to continually lie to and ignore those not on their immediate bubble, then it's not particularly surprising when populists / populist policies take hold and people gravitate to Brexit / Trump.

Angry Grimace said:

That isn't actually true. And it's not "seen" as an extremist: if you describe a member of your own political faction as a Nazi Sympathizer you're an extremist.

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I wasn't there for the thread, was the person sympathizing with Nazis? And it's still odd you decide to focus on rhetoric from a small gaming forum instead of actual policy of said gaming forum full of liberal extremists.

I just read an article where some dude rambled about smugness for five paragraphs and never explained how the left is destroying itself. He just kept rambling about smugness and assumed we knew what he is talking about.

Angry Grimace said:

That isn't actually true. And it's not "seen" as an extremist: if you describe a member of your own political faction as a Nazi Sympathizer you're an extremist.

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No far leftist would be a Nazi sympathizer.

Tricky Diver said:

It reminds me of this article on this article in The Guardian (now 18 months old) that has really stuck with me:

https://www.theguardian.com/comment...nomists-failing-us-booming-britain-gdp-london

When the status quo is so shit and is literally making people poorer while those in power are perfectly happy to continually lie to and ignore those not on their immediate bubble, then it's not particularly surprising when populists / populist policies take hold and people gravitate to Brexit / Trump.

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Economic anxiety is an excuse that they use to deny/rationalize/make palatable their actual issues: Racism, Xenophobia, Homophobia, etc.

People on the left (who aren't racist/etc.) seize upon this viewing these people to be just like them, a majority for the taking. But there's no such majority possible because they misunderstand the source of their unhappiness and what they value at the ballot box.

Psychoward said:

It's really weird that OP specified to read the OP and article when it's the same exact shit right/centrist pundits spit out on a weekly basis about the left

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The OP wanted their thread to be taken more seriously than it actually deserves.

Beefy said:

Trash ass website

https://unherd.com/about-unherd/

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This is the website I want to lecture me about smugness.

Fucking LOL. What a troll OP.

maluma baby! said:

1)Because not being sympathetic to hateful bigots means you wouldn't care about like 99% of the people that has ever lived (According to our standards), should we not care about Africa and the middle east? Since that region is host to some of the most hateful people around, are we gonna turn around the ships if it turns out the migrants dont like gay people?

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Do not go there. The situations are not the same. The U.S. wasn't exploited, colonized, and then had puppet dictators installed from foreign powers to screw over the populace by taking their resources, suppressing their education, and then treat them like garbage which continues to this day. And even then, it's fine to call them out if they express hateful shit

2)Liberals can be poor, and in that case you see all the compassion in the world, but if they vote red is basically their fault they are poor.

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Basically yeah. Kansans had time and time again to not vote for the Republicans who done nothing but destroyed their state. If it was one time thing, whatever. But they just... keep... doing it. And that's just Kansas.

3)It's not like i have specific examples, but they do come on, people usually use the word uneducated to mean stupid and seem to be happy when bad things happen to them.

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People aren't happy that uneducated people suffer because they're uneducated. They're happy because they get to suffer the consequences of their actions. Alex Jones isn't poor and we still ragged on him because he's a hateful person who's a danger to society. Same for Richard Spencer, Milo Yiannopoulos

And i dont wan't gay people nor people of color to stop complaining, i don't know where would you get that, it's not like i think this people ideas are "right" but i definitely find jarring to see the left mocking poor and uneducated people and not caring for them.

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By saying we should sympathize with bigots, you're downplaying their harm they do on oppressed. If someone stabbed you in the gut, would you feel sympathy for the attacker if you learn he was poor? No. Because he did major harm to you.

TinfoilHatsROn said:

This is the website I want to lecture me about smugness.

Fucking LOL. What a troll OP.

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(please read this op) from the start is pretty telling

nynt9 said:

(please read this op) from the start is pretty telling

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I'm glad none of the long time posters here were fooled by this concern troll behavior. This thread backfire is one I'm proud of.

Though, to be fair, it was pretty obvious. Even looking at the basic context. Plus that quote in the OP gave it away.

Fat4all said:

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Now this is the level of discourse this article deserves.

Kirblar said:

Citations needed on that claim. Claiming that anti-EU parties are more socially liberal than pro-EU ones seems completely ridiculous to me.

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This ignorance is on you, and why you've received the pushback from other European users. It's also not positioned as pro-EU and anti-EU on what separates social issues, that's showing your bias. Parties can be anti-EU for different reasons, and all pro-EU parties can vary quite much in how socially liberal they are.

boxoctosis said:

So, here's an article worth discussing.

https://unherd.com/2018/07/liberal-smugness-will-destroy-left/

A warning, it's confrontational, pointy, and you may not agree. But I think it surfaces a valid point. That the left is essentially cannibalising itself, to the benefit of the right.

It gets plus points for directing you at the excellent works of Thomas Frank.

I particularly liked this paragraph



Goes to a particular bugbear of mine, that we view each other increasingly on purely economic terms , and not on social worth. My contention is that 40 years of neoliberal economics in the West have made us unable to discuss our worth in anything other than economic terms. And in doing so we lose our fundamental humanity.

This isn't another Brexit thread, God forbid, but I'm interested in the views set out here.

What say you?

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I'll be smug by not defending Nazi's thank you very much.

Liberals just have to learn how to not be over sensitive snowflakes who get offended by everything while also not being "smug" because that's being mean.

Fat4all said:

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I always knew you were a lewd degenerate doggo.

Veggen said:

This ignorance is on you, and why you've received the pushback from other European users. It's also not positioned as pro-EU and anti-EU on what separates social issues, that's showing your bias. Parties can be anti-EU for different reasons, and all pro-EU parties can vary quite much in how socially liberal they are.

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My criticism of that original graph is that hard left parties need to be stretched to the upper left quadrant. Not that they should only be in it.

The viewpoint of the populist voter is "I'm in favor of social welfare benefits....to my group, not anyone else" is in the upper left and that's absolutely the position of some on the hard left and why those parties bleed voters to the right wing. It's not ignorant to ask that a graph reflect that these people exist.