This makes me angry. I encounter it online and in the wild all the time. People have a problem with billionaires and corporations owning everything. They don’t have a problem with mom-and-pop landlords living in the neighborhood (whatever’s left of it) and renting out a few AirBnBs. People feel this way because they can’t see a way out of capitalism except saving up some money and getting their own AirBnbs to exploit the land and proletariat, even though small landlords are neither happy nor interesting people, and they are still trapped inside capitalism.
People with an anti-corporate and anti-billionaire mindset are moving in the right direction, but they’re still beholden to capitalist individualism. It’s the same with local small businesses, even though these businesses are buying all their products from big businesses, selling them for a massive markup, and (in my experience) cheating their employees far more often than big business. Government jobs are the only ones I’ve had where I didn’t feel like I was going to be fired or screwed every single day I was there.
I saw a Sysco truck a few days ago outside the only restaurant in my very small town. This place was my first job (as a bus boy) a loooooong time ago. They stiffed me on my first paycheck (I had been working an unpaid training period without knowing it, I was also supposed to be a psychic at this place) and I walked out. In the second or third year of the pandemic I saw a girl who couldn’t have been more than eight years old working in an apron there (she was related to the family that owns the place). I’ve lived here off-and-on for decades and almost no one ever went to that restaurant; everyone knew you’d get sick if you ate their food. We suspected that it was a mafia money-laundering operation, since the owners drive red corvettes and seem to be rolling in dough. Tourists do eat there more regularly now even though the place has noticeably bad yelp reviews.
In a colonial context, big or small bourgeoisie can be revolutionary. In an imperialist context like in the USA, they are almost never revolutionary.
Also, the phrase “during the pandemic” makes me angry! A friend living overseas just told me yesterday that they had gotten sick and lost their sense of taste. Look up recent online reviews for scented candles.
Using “childish” as an insult. Bruh, have you talked with kids? Literally any kids. Easiest group of people on Earth to radicalize.
“Israel” is to blame for everything but somehow the USA is still good. This is thanks to Hollywood and the fact that the USA is a far bigger and more successful “Israel.” Very few people know that Columbus was a Zionist. People around the world still dream of living here and making it big because of Hollywood movies and friends or relatives who immigrated here and somehow made it work.
In my experience, Arabic speakers are ready for a revolution, as long as it excludes women’s liberation / queer liberation. Spanish speakers have profound levels of liberal brainworms. Portuguese speakers are typically pretty aligned with hexbear without knowing it. White leftists seem uninterested in returning the USA to indigenous sovereignty and paying full reparations to slaves / the descendants of slaves, and this is one major reason why their movements always go nowhere. (I hate the term “leftist” but I don’t know what else to call these people since they aren’t communists and yet they’re still a bit more radical than the average democrat.)
What are some of your left-ish peeves you regularly encounter online?
Body shaming against reactionaries, if a reactionary has 2 characters one that harms others and is shared by people who harm others and one doesn’t and is shared by people who don’t harm others, why shame the one that doesn’t harm others? like why care if for example Hitler got one ball? the nazi forces that he was an important part of committed a genocide, only people getting hurt are ones with genitalia not considered to be the norm. Same thing with beauty, balding, voice, birth-names and everything else.
Faux-progressive brain worms, happens with people who used to be rebels without a cause, liberals and most famously reddit atheists. talking about authoritarianism or chauvinism against the third world. liberal feminism liberal anti-racism liberal queer rights, which can be seen through tokenisation (Mamdani) or fetishization (Mamdani). There’s also the hazing stuff about somdier wives.
The lionization and glazing of American soldiers, because “uhm ecery revolution neede-” you fucking larpers need soldiers not colonial cops, they have as much experience as a police officer, most combat done was calling an airstrike on a farmer’s home in Afghanistan, fuck he gonna do? call an airstrike from the American revolutionary front’s f35 on an Amazon warehouse?
biggest peeve for me is when people’s interest in socialist politics seems to stem more from a desire to be the smartest and/or most morally righteous guy/gal/enby in the room rather than out of a genuine desire for a better world. it’s a tendency that’s existed since the beginning of any kind of socialist movement, but it’s intensely heightened by the nature of the internet. it can also exist alongside a genuine desire for liberation and is a contradiction we all have the capacity to slip into, so is something to always stay vigilant against in ourselves.
tied to the above, but another peeve is lingering individualist idealist/moralistic puritan brainworms in people who have otherwise come to the correct conclusion.
and not exactly a peeve, but something to always keep in mind and which is tied to all of the above: coming to socialist politics on an intellectual level is not the same as coming to terms with how hegemonic all of these hierarchies are in our day-to-day lives, is not the same as coming to terms with all the ways they’ve shaped us, & is not the same as unlearning/decolonizing ourselves of these thoughts and behaviors. the latter is a lifelong process, which is something i have to remind myself of every time i encounter a new blindspot in myself, or a blindspot in a comrade/fellow traveler that surprises me and seems intuitive/obvious to where i’m at in my own political journey, but which isn’t obvious yet to them.
anti-veganism is the biggest one. so many of the most radical communists you’ve ever seen suddenly turn into fascists when their victims can’t speak english. because apparently screams of pain and horror aren’t universal enough.
the pig didn’t say “no, I don’t want you to stab me, that hurts” while I was stabbing it so its suffering doesn’t count. ughNon-vegan communists should concede the moral correctness of veganism even if they aren’t there yet. Rooting out cognitive dissonance and latent prejudice is a fundamental aspect of being a communist. Inability or unwillingness to do that is very suspicious
You’re right, but I think I’d rather hang out with a non-vegan commie, than a non-commie vegan. I’m vegan myself but I find too many of them are insufferable libs who took to veganism as a shortcut to moral superiority.
When “working” at a “newspaper” I once got into an argument with my editor about whether lobsters could feel pain. AFAIK, there isn’t any scientific research showing that they are capable of feeling pain (although obviously they are), so we couldn’t mention their capacity for feeling things in some article we were publishing about them. (I only lasted at this job for three months and got fired for refusing to approve a transphobic article.)
AFAIK, there isn’t any scientific research showing that they are capable of feeling pain
They are capable of prefering one kind of stimuli to another and choosing to avoid stimuli associated with damage, and they interpret this stimuli through a nervous system containing nociceptors that respond to blockages of the COX reactions.
Any claim that they are not capable of feeling pain is pure sophistry sniffing your own farts about the concept of “Emotions”.
Using “childish” as an insult. Bruh, have you talked with kids? Literally any kids. Easiest group of people on Earth to radicalize.
as with most denigration that consists of comparison with a lower hierarchical strata, it is not based in truth but in the universality of the discrimination itself. we say that being like a child is insulting largely on the grounds of an adult distaste for the notion of the rights of children. “you don’t have the right to protest your conditions: you are dependent on me for any survival at all.”
in other words, much like calling police “pigs” is an insult to pigs, calling people childish is most of the time not literally descriptive but first and foremost an insult to children.
You could be right but I always thought the idea of calling someone childish was the implication of them lacking the experience, maturity or education to have an informed opinion/discussion on the topic at hand.
You could always just say “You are inexperienced.” To associate being a child with the idea that, even having grown, you have not gained enough experience, it what makes it hierarchical.
