Welcome to Progressive Politics! A place for news updates and political discussion from a left perspective. Conservatives and centrists are welcome just try and keep it civil :)
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Some people need to learn about the alt-right’s cultivated ignorance via hard experience.
The rest of us work just fine via observation.
“Meet me halfway”, says the unreasonable man.
You take one step forward, and they take one step backwards.
“Why can’t you meet me halfway?”, complains the unreasonable man.
And thus, conservatism in a nutshell.
Genuinely surprised this was not in Leopards Ate My Face
Feel free to share it there lol. I did consider posting it there, as you might have guessed from my leopard emoji.
I just replied to another comment with this but I'll put it as a top level comment here because I think it's important.
I want MORE right wing idiots to realize they're wrong and join our camp. The more the better. Remember, these people are still our neighbors, they still exist and we will have to interact with them outside our homes. I want more reasonable people, so when we do have converts, please receive them with open arms.
Okay, you were a huge idiot, but welcome to sanity part 1. Of they're big enough to realize they were wrong (and they've had a LOT of brainwashing, it takes a lot for them to snap out of the crazy) we should be big enough to say bygones.
I understand the want for revenge because they were "the enemy". I understand, they were a huge asshole and now we have to play nice with them? That doesn't sound fair! But I think we have to, we want to welcome more idiots into sanity and reason. The less idiots out there, the better. And for what it's worth, there are people that listen to her, if they can now be on the side of reason, they can pull a lot more people with them.
If we don't we'll make it harder for people to move out of the right wing camp, and I want much much less people in the right wing camp
Part of the problem is, this is not the first time this assault on minorities has happened; and many of the people who voted for Trump were previously thought of as allies who were reformed.
We can even scare our own allies by “making nice” with villains. I remember hearing out a very betrayed voter whose core issue of dismay was hearing Gavin Newsom get cowed by Joe Rogan into saying supporting Trans people was a mistake.
People like Joe Rogan have HURT them. I want you to picture having someone that ruined your life, and picture what it’s like to have them sleeping in your home, based on nothing more than “Hey, bud. We’re good now, right?”
Here is what you should do, Brianna:
Delete your twitter and never post about trans issues again. When you have been so consistently wrong about about something for such a long time, it is the best thing for everyone to simply accept that you shouldn't be part of the conversation anymore rather than trying to claw your way back into it.
(I know she isn't actually reading.)
A good compromise is never just halfway between two policies. It requires understanding both perspectives and addressing their actual problems. So the compromise here would be trans rights for trans people, and free mental health care for anti-trans people.
The Trans Athlete debate also never seems to address the fact that it's all unfair from the get go. Being born to a poor family? Being born with a birth defect? Being born into an unsupportive family/community? Being born at the wrong time of year?
It also shouldn't matter how well someone does in sports. No athlete is using their skills in the work place and students shouldn't need athletics scholarships to pay for school. It should just be for fun with nothing on the line.
In the real world, it doesn't even cause a real fairness issue. The Olympics started allowing trans competitors in the 90s, but there's never been a trans medal winner. If there was a real advantage, then you'd expect the best person at some sports in some counties to be trans, so there to be trans athletes competing, and their advantage to put them on the podium. You'd also potentially expect some countries to pad their team with trans people to get more medals. This hasn't happened.
I think you're kind of confusing trans people and people with DSDs. The Olympics stopped doing sex testing themselves in the 90's. There have been a few biological males with DSDs that won women's medals in the Olympics though. All 3 medals for the women's 800m at the 2016 Rio Olympics were awarded to biological males, Caster Semenya, Francine Niyonsaba, and Margaret Wambui. Likewise, Imane Khelif and Lin Yu-ting are also biologically male (not trans as some people incorrectly claimed) and notably won gold in 2024. They were all wrongly assigned female at birth but have the physical advantages of male puberty.
Ana Caldas is a more specific example of why trans people that are biologically male have an insurmountable advantage in the women's category.
Imane Khelif and Lin Yu-ting are also biologically male
This is a lie. Wikipedia links to no fewer than 3 sources that confirm this is a lie. I will be blocking you.
"Those cheering fans have embraced Khelif throughout her run in Paris even as she faced an extraordinary amount of scrutiny from world leaders, major celebrities and others who have questioned her eligibility or falsely claimed she was a man." -- https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/algerian-boxer-imane-khelif-fights-for-olympic-gold-after-enduring-abuse-fueled-by-misinformation
'The participation of Algeria's Khelif and Taiwan's Lin has proved controversial given they were disqualified from the 2023 World Championships.
"Let's be very clear, we are talking about women's boxing," said Bach at Saturday's daily IOC briefing.
"We have two boxers who are born as a woman, who have been raised as a woman, who have a passport as a woman and who have competed for many years as a woman.
"This is the clear definition of a woman. There was never any doubt about them being a woman."' -- https://www.bbc.com/sport/olympics/articles/c28e88jdprno
'Khelif and a second boxer, Taiwan's Lin Yu-ting, fell foul of IBA eligibility rules [...].
[...] a March 2023 IBA board meeting stated that "the athletes do not meet one of the eligibility criteria", without stating which one.' -- https://www.reuters.com/sports/olympics/who-is-algerian-boxer-imane-khelif-2024-08-03/
We have two boxers who are born as a woman [..]
Right, they were incorrectly assigned female at birth and raised as women but are biologically male, because
the athletes do not meet one of the eligibility criteria
I'm confused as to why you think those quotes support your point. The sex testing was done by an accredited lab, and is the eligibility criteria they do not meet.
The trans athlete debate was a solved problem before the right wing learned about it. Let the professional authority body of whatever sport, in collaboration with relevant medical professionals, determine what hormone levels or transition progress is qualifying or unqualifying in each individual sport in a case by case basis. Because we tried this before, with genetic testing of Olympic female athletes and enough turned out intersex or androgyn disordered that they stopped doing it.
Fuck the middleground.
"I thought if I let the leopards eat a little of my face they wouldn't take it all."
Wu is just the latest poster child for Reactionary Uncle Tom washouts. There's internet graveyards full of would-be pundits and ex-liberal turncoats who realized far too late that The Log Cabin Republicans and Blacks for Trump weren't going to protect them when fascists came knocking.
The thing you need to recognize about Wu - more than anything else - is that she comes from money. Look at my Porsche collection money. She's reactionary because that's where she eats. And pivoting her identity as a Trans Woman into an income stream as a reactionary poster is just the path failkids of the GenZ+ generations are trained into.
Brianna Wu is a product of her material conditions. In a better world, she wouldn't be able to horde wealth at her neighbors' expense. And she wouldn't have an economic incentive to fuck over her Trans peers in hopes of maintaining her precarious position among the wealthy elites.
once again ignoring entirely that trans masc people exist and we are impacted by the bullshit she spouts as well. what impacts one of us affects all of us, and I am not your fucking sister.
What The hell are extreme Position on "trans people" that come from trans people themselves? Such extreme stuff like "just let everyone life the way they want and dont be fucking dick?"
I seriously have no fucking clue what she could mean that might be somewhat controversial. The only thing I could think of is stuff like "chop everyone's dick off" but that's more like extreme feminism and not just "extreme trans".
I think that people like to imagine this opposite dangerous "extreme" to validate that they can have the right to hold their problematic values. But that other extreme is basically a boogeyman. I hear from frienda and family on every subject "oh but we should be careful to not go too far in the other extreme". As if it was a real threat. Not only because we are so closer to right wing extremism at the moment but also because how can caring about other people can be "too extreme".
This is why advocating for "finding middle ground", or centrism, or this repackaged warmed over Abundance crap is so toxic.
You can't match these people half way. you have to beat them
Most arguments have a middle ground, but its a case by case basis. In this case the sides are:
let a marginalized group experience a little joy and feel comfortable in their bodies
refuse to accept that a middle school understanding of gender and biology might not be totally correct.
Meeting in the middle here is how you get second class citizens.
I don’t think she’s right wing. Maybe in the same way that I jokingly call people right wing when they’re wrong, but I don’t think she’s actually traitor lunatic.
Ah, Brianna Wu. Theres a name Ive not heard in a while. Always looking to grift off something or other for her own gain. I wonder what she needs money for this time...
The problem with compromising for a “middle ground” is that, when the right decide to re-litigate the issue (if they ever stop litigating to begin with), your starting position is now that middle ground. Compromising for a middle ground simply moves the Overton window to the right.
It’s sad she’s so close but still on ‘I want a middle ground on these issues’ really? Like…. She is okay with a little disrespect? A little discrimination?
Just a little second class citizen, as a treat.
First off, Brianna Wu is not my sister or comrade, so she can write that down.
Goldwater was absolute dogwater but he was right about republicans in 1981…
“On religious issues there can be little or no compromise. There is no position on which people are so immovable as their religious beliefs."
"Politics and governing demand compromise. But these Christians believe they are acting in the name of God, so they can't and won't compromise. I know, I've tried to deal with them."
"The problem is, they are getting crazier and crazier."
They're not, they just don't feel the need to hide those parts of their goals any more, and you should have listened to us when we warned you about those goals.
And you should be listening to us now about their future goals.
"You know, I'm starting to think these ethnicity-critical Nazis can't be reasoned with."
Even after all of that, she still doesn't get it:
I think many of our most extreme ideas are bad. But theirs are worse.
The problem is that "our" (using quotes as I'm only progressive, not LGBTQ+) most extreme ideas are only held by a minority of progressive people, and meanwhile the things she thinks are their "most extreme ideas" are the ones that she saw personally, while interacting with people who don't mind interacting with a trans-woman. Those aren't their "most extreme ideas." They're their mainstream ideas.
She's comparing our most extreme ideas against their mainstream ideas.
I would love to know what those extreme left ideas that are bad are. Like 99% of progressive ideas boil down to "stop treating other people like shit."
Is Brianna wu grifting to the left because she realizes there isn't a place for her on the right anymore? I'm a bit too cynical to believe this is legitimate since the right has been like this for quite a while. Just with the trump admin the center right position on the trans movement is not a profitable option for pundits anymore
If this truly is a come to Jesus moment, I'll believe it if she can back it up over time
I think a lot of the pickme's out there are like the rats on a doomed ship. They are sensing the coming shift before anyone else because they have less to lose and more to gain from becoming early adopters of the new "I was fooled" narrative that is going to absolutely sweep the right after Trump finally keels over.
There will be no successor, at least not of equal power and leadership who can hold Trump's infinity stone of stupidity, his base of fanatical loyalists who cling to his fetid authenticity like ticks on the back of a deer with spongiform encephalitis.
So when the pendulum of social discourse swings the other way, it will be like magic... every single Trump die-hard and zionist riding on the fact that their positions can hide behind the far worse things going on, will have up and just disappeared like farts in the wind. It will be a miracle, it will be like every nazi and trump sycophant just evaporated back into the shadows, and the grifters will have to suddenly race back into the overton window to capitalize on this temporary change in wind direction.
In a negotiation its important to ask for more than you want. Compromise is what you reach during negotiations. If you start your negotiations from a pre-compromised position, you're just ceding ground to the other side.
Support the extremists. Support those who go too far and ask too much, as that's the only way to reach a fair and reasonable compromise.
