As a class lefty, my fear is that the Identity Politics Woke Left will alienate the middle with arguments for social justice that seem smug and trivial to voters who are struggling to pay the bills, feed their kids and keep a roof over their heads. You hold power if you can get to 51% and yelling, ‘I’m different and you’re wrong’ is no recruitment method.
Alienating voters to the Left forces them to to vote for the Right, even when the Right’s economic agenda actually ends up hurting those voters while empowering the already wealthy.
We need far less divisive identity politics virtue signalling and far more universal benefits that progress everyone. While identity politics is an important personal pathway for understanding how one comes to politics, it is ultimately a flawed model to win the democratic majority. In its most extreme mutation Identity Politics is the very embodiment of white supremacy.
This issue was captured perfectly with this joke…
…unfortunately our political debate now occurs on social media platforms algorithmically fuelled by personal outrage coupled with a Millennial culture of subjective micro aggression policing.
Identity politics encourages splits into smaller factions focused only on the narcissism of tiny differences while practicing ideological rituals of virtue signalling and public call outs.
I fear the ability to divide rather than bond means the Right will remain in accession. The right looks for conscripts, the left looks for traitors.
If you want a real voyage into the dark heart of NZ – check out the comments on the New Conservative Party Facebook Page – the woke backlash has found a political home.
To counter social injustice effectively in 2019 & 2020 we don’t need more decent people becoming woke activists, we need more woke activists becoming decent people.
Indeed Martyn, my take is that the Woke Left are the mirror image of Trump supporters in terms of extreme intolerance of opposing viewpoints.
Peterson states it well for somebody labelled Alt right etc, stating that this one eyed ideological possession precludes dialogue, and that he says is dangerous.
Myself I’m sick of being accused of being a National supporter when I have never voted for them. I’m tired of being told that I’m a fascist when I challenge the victim assumptions of the Woke despite ample evidence to the contrary. And I’m bored with these progressive liberal wets who want Utopia in their image at my expense.
So let’s admit it, I have committed the ultimate sin of being born white and male, which of course makes me a patriarchal oppressor of women, children, blacks, gays, Martians, well bloody everybody really cos let’s face it it’s genetic and I fekkin hate them all. Or so I’m told.
If asked nicely I will admit I’m a conservative yet liberal (non judgemental live and let live) type. Old fashioned Labour, equality of opportunity type, opposed to equality of outcome. Nats don’t believe in equality of opportunity, they are about privilege for them. Of course Nats wouldn’t object to the social nastiness of Woke acolytes so long as it divides the Left and keeps their privilege going. Ultimately Nats understand identity politics better because they know the corollary of claimed victim status is reward, and Nats are always willing to reward and recruit.
Yknow if someone’s premises are internally contradictory we can say what they are proposing is impossible without looking at their start conditions. With that in mind the God as described in the currently 3 most popular monotheisms, Judaism, Christianity & Islam is internally contradictory as described in each’s respective holy texts. Without even knowing the state of the universe I already know that the deity they describe doesn’t exist.
I never get the whole big debate about morality. We’re just people coming together deciding on rules for how to live together, basing them on what we knows makes us individually & collectively happy, healthy, and long-lived. I don’t care whether I match up to some esoteric standard or whether I’m behaving differently than our ancestors do. I sure as hell don’t care about a number of religions claiming that I’m “offending god” with my thoughts or deeds when they can’t offer any shred of concrete evidence that he manifests in reality.
Anyone who doesn’t base their morality on what makes societies & individuals flourish(not that we might not disagree on the specifics of what causes civilizations to perform well) isn’t someone I care to building a society with or interact with. If they have a problem they can go form their own little club somewhere else.
With that in mind I know that drinking bleach can kill me. I consider forcing someone to drink bleach to be immoral. We know a lot about how sex & human relationships effect emotional health & the health of two consenting adults. With that in mind two partners engaging in homosexual relationships is no more healthy or unhealthy than heterosexual relationships where pregnancy either through contraception or sterilization is not possible. On a societal level we know from observations that the legality of homosexuality & homosexual unions doesn’t seem to cause societies to collapse and there is a strong correlation with causation unclear that in countries where homosexuality & homosexual marriage is banned tend to perform worse on metrics of social health. While I can’t conclusively say that banning homosexuality and homosexual acts leads societies to performing worse, I can at least claim that the position that making homosexuality & same-sex unions legal leads to lower social health to be false.
Jonathon Pie, … Monty Python….. I’m on board 100%.
Its time the politically correct were ignored for the ulterior motive , establishment cowering, elitist ass licking jerk offs they really are.
Appeasing fascists has ever worked out well for the left. It’s just makes them be seen by the right as being weak and vulnerable. The ugliness of the right does not emanate as a reaction to the left but from inside their own minds.
Exhibit A of what MB’s talking about.
MB: You have to win the middle and yelling ‘racist & fascist at everyone doesn’t work’
E Pineapple: ‘We’ have to yell fascist, everyone on the right is ugly in their own mind!’
Jesus wept.
That’s because the Woke Left are not Left at all, Bomber… they’re of the propertied class and its children
truth is the new hate speech, economic nationalism is the new Left
Claiming that the woke are not decent people is hate speech Martin.
its odd I remember a time when lefties had megaphones and matched down Queen St and Lambton Quay and had meetings in which everyone yelled at everyone and no one gave way. Martyn the time when the left listened to the right then calmly countered the points and vis versa never happened. We yelled jeered and catcalled in the same way as they do now and older activists told us we were destroying the left’s message in the same way you are doing now. The difference is you are now older and think that “we cant change people by talking over the top of them” as my mother used to tell me, and as I told her “I don’t care, they need to change”. The anti-nuclear, anti-tour, anti- racism peoples children have produced the woke generation who see issues differently. You call it woke and jeer at it but they have more in common with Woody Guthrie’s level of anger than the last two generations of nice middle class at University until we get a real job lefties.
You can’t change beliefs by talking. All you can do is to confirm a belief/opinion – whether for or against.
Where is the common ground between left and right?
Which are the shared beliefs bwteen the two?
Why are we still looking at this as a conflict or competition? Especially in this country with its manufactured ‘winners and losers’ mindset…
Before, when sport was mostly for amateurs and professionals were few in number, were we quite so vicious about ‘losers’ and different interests/values? (Probably. Part of the enduring Kiwi Way.)
Common ground. Explorations. Open minds. Multiple and lifelong opportunities to experience the sameness in ‘different’ people – and allow them their differences in culture and customs, as we hope they will allow us our cultures and customs.
There’s no need to force ‘tolerance and acceptance’.
Where are we the same?
Time for vast change in the ways we guide and govern our country.
Problem is Labour forgot who they represented and under Lange & Douglas blindly followed the New World Neoliberal Economic Model which was an Absolute F%&k Up IMHO
How on earth is ‘woke’ politics Left wing??
Any ‘woke’ groups you know of pushing ‘class war’ messages?
Most, if not all ‘woke’ messaging is firmly grounded in the centre. Which is why, eventually, all ‘woke’ causes end up as marketing campaigns for banks, oil and dairy companies…
The Left deserves a good kick up the butt…but stop buying into MSM misinformation about ‘whats wrong with the Left’. Its just two faced bs designed to distract and undermine.
Nah well there’s so many sock puppets and meat puppets going around now adays, and overwhlemingly they’re payed government stooges just trying to filter information through western propaganda machines, commercial media, social media ect. That’s why I got into the intellectual dark web in the first place because I noticed multi fake accounts running under the same IP address. And when looking at there content, it was all lies basically. Fast forward 6 years and these perpetual lies are the gospel of drunks, con artists, 1080 activists, like all of the stupid that we are bumping up against was litterally manufactured by state-actors, not non-state actors. I litterally got to a point where I was like, fuck it, I’m not being nice to these stupid muppets any more but I digress. It’s just really difficult convening the woke left that they’re crazy when they don’t even know they’re crazy.
Apologies for the bad grammar and no paragraphs. Just had to blast it out.
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