While many believe young people are becoming more liberal, data shows that 12th grade boys are nearly twice as likely to identify as conservative compared to liberal. Around 25% of high school seniors identify as conservative while only 13% identify as liberal. In contrast, the share of 12th grade girls identifying as liberal has risen to 30%. Many factors may contribute to this trend, including the rhetoric of Donald Trump which appealed to disaffected young men, and the focus of progressive movements on issues of gender and racial equality which some young men perceive as a “matriarchy.” However, most high school seniors claim no political identity, and many boys in high school do not actively discuss
The rate of girls identitying as liberal is significantly higher and unlike the conservative boys, the rate hasn’t started dropping off. Probably because the girls face actual threats to their freedoms, while the conservative boys’ complaints are about a bunch of imaginary nonsense.
But of course it’s boys who get the headline. The hill is a right wing dumpster bin.
This is definitely right-wing trash. However, we should be using headlines like this to fire up the country. Everyone knows that “republican” men think they have the last say about reproductive rights. Let’s use their own “reports” to show those women that their boyfriends/husbands/fathers think they own them.
That’s a little bit sexist
while the conservative boys’ complaints are about a bunch of imaginary nonsense.
The verbalized complaints, yes.
The passive misandry that’s pushing boys right is a very real thing.
Please define passive misandry
A dismissal or lack of consideration for the unique issues facing men and boys and the unique solutions they require. Focusing exclusively on women and girls. Viewing boys as defective girls.
In this thread, here’s a few specific examples
Let’s use their own “reports” to show those women that their boyfriends/husbands/fathers think they own them.
The rate of girls identitying as liberal is significantly higher[…]Probably because the girls face actual threats to their freedoms, while the conservative boys’ complaints are about a bunch of imaginary nonsense.
I was a “Fox News”-viewing turd in high school, too[…]then I grew up.
It’s passive because it’s not direct and focused. It’s more neglect than abuse. Men’s problems are not just secondary; they’re not even worth consideration, and men should just Fix It Themselves.
Schools in particular are extremely geared towards focusing on girls and their successful development.
What male -specific rights are currently threatened or actively being removed?
Several boys only organizations or programs have changed to accepting all genders. Meanwhile, most girls only organizations or programs have remained girls only.
This is right wing nonsense right here ^
What you just said (even if it were true, which I don’t actually believe to be the case) what you said is NOT-infringing on anyone’s rights.
Gendered organizations take away valuable educational opportunities from the opposite gender when they have no alternative. Since this is about high schoolers, it’s worth noting that when I was in high school, there were some extra-curricular educational opportunities that were girls-only and had no open-enrollment equivalent whatsoever. Of course, if those same clubs only allowed boys, there would be a shitstorm and people would probably end up losing their jobs over it.
So what? That has nothing to do with anyone’s rights. Girls are facing having their body autonomy stripped away and the best you can come up with for boys is that they don’t have boys only orgs at school anymore?
Conservatives are so fucking soft.
Recess. Unstructured outdoor play including monitored roughhousing.
lol what are you smoking? Recess hasn’t gone anywhere lmao. In fact, I fucking wish I had as cool of a playground for recess as my nephew does when I was a kid. Shit’s fancy as fuck, all kinds of monkey bars, rock walls, a puke-a-tron that puts the merry-go-rounds of old to shame, etc… Mind you, he goes to school in a super liberal school district of an already very liberal state. The park district playgrounds have gotten way cooler too, one of the playgrounds at my local park has a fucking zipline now.
The fact that fucking recess is the best you could come up with, and it’s just blatantly not even fucking true, says it all.
Also, girls like outdoor recess too, MORE so than boys, actually, in my experience. What a weird thing to gender.
The gender performance gap in primary and secondary education is, however, well documented, with girls outperforming boys to a statistically significant degree in ELA across the board, but with variability from school district to school district in math. Interestingly, boys tend to outperform girls in math mostly in higher income school districts, suggesting that two things can be true at once: patriarchal attitudes around boys and math performance can and do persist, mostly in white bread communities, AND, the educational system as a whole may be failing some boys, mostly in lower income communities.
Where the discussion gets gross, of course, is where MRA types use these statistics as a justification for misogyny, or on the flip side where those sensitive to that go out of their way to wave stats like this away, sometimes even making a ‘boys will be boys’ argument that is historically problematic for completely different reasons and in the end amounts to blaming the kids for the problem.
Again, two things can be true at once - society is still male dominated and victimizes women in many facets of life. At the same time, the little boys struggling at school … mostly in poor neighborhoods … aren’t the root of the problem, and certainly aren’t the ‘dominant class’ referred to above. The conversation should not be a zero sum game where recognizing the challenges of one group means you are trivializing the challenges of another.
(Though in fairness many do try to make it thus, so the caution is understandable).
in my experience
We can trade anecdotes (and insults) all day long and none of it means a thing. You asked for a specific example and I gave you one. Just the first one off the top of my head. Schools in my area are canceling unstructured outdoor play time, which hurts boys more than girls.
Here’s one you’re probably more familiar with, since it’s nationwide: men being pushed out of careers in education.
I’m sure you’ll just move the goalposts on that one too though. “Ah but it’s not GOVERNMENT doing it so it doesn’t count!” or “I know a male teacher so it doesn’t count!”
It’s almost like he’d been told the opinion he was supposed to hold and then had to frantically explain why when someone finally asked him.
Do you have kids? I do. My boy has more than enough unstructured outdoor play and comes home scraped up all the time. I’ve volunteered as a lunch / recess monitor. They’re doing just fine and doing young boy things.
Good anecdotal evidence, the numbers are against you
Did you know that we currently still have almost exactly the same school form that we had when school was for boys only? It was literally designed with only boys in mind. That the sexism girls face, which makes them more compliant and more pleasing for teachers, is now seen as an attack on boys is hilarious. When you want them to be equally liked by the teachers you will have to punish boys as much as girls for being rough. You have to encourage boys as well to stay clean, play domestic shit indoors and care more for their social appearance. Because that’s what giving girls their current “advantage”.
Lol recess is a right now?
Yeah, I’m not buying it. The Patriarchy is real, and whatever imagined neglect you think is happening is so far removed from the reality of what women have to deal with all day every day that it’s laughable. Won’t someone think of the poor dominant class?
Conservatives are thinking of them. They’re the only ones, apparently. Is it any wonder that’s where their allegiance goes?
“Haha, fuck you and everyone like you” is a terrible way to persuade people to your side.
What sucks is that conservatives don’t generally act in most men’s best interests either. It’s just a grift to get us to buy in to their brand and vote for them. Look at people like Andrew Tate.
Talking about the issues women and girls face is not an attack on men and boys.
Talking exclusively about the issues women and girls face is, though.
Why? Following your logic it would also be sexist against women to write an article or start a discussion without addressing women’s issues as well. Wouldn’t it also be racist and ableist if you don’t talk about the issues minorities face? Don’t you see how this doesn’t make sense?
It’s not discrimatory against all other “groups” if you bring up the issues of one group.
But of course it’s boys who get the headline. The hill is a right wing dumpster bin.
Flaming dumpster bin!
It’s just journalism in general. “Girls are liberal” is pretty much a non-story, it’s expected. You don’t publish those.
“High school boys are becoming more conservative” can be seen as surprising by many, and thus newsworthy.
I suspect it’s less due to the rhetoric of Donald Trump & more due to the influence of Andrew Tate, Jordan Peterson & Joe Rogan.
Well, think about it. Who is the most confused, scared, and angry about women not throwing themselves at their feet? Pubescent boys. The entire right wing media sphere is aimed at someone with the temperament and unleashed anger and horniness of high school boys, in a time when kids are having less sex. These perpetually online kids are being fed into the ecosystem through YouTube, then they hear it normalized on fox/literally any right wing outlet, and then they get those poisonous ideas reinforced when they go to school and don’t get laid by the hottest girl they know.
I don’t think these things were planned, by any means. But they sure did work out for them.
No, those personalities rose due to the mainstream (mainly left) not being able to discuss normal masculinity and overall only portraying masculinity as something toxic. When you go in one radical direction, you get radical response (Tate, etc).
We need normal, non-partisan discussion and stance towards masculinity.
Normal masculinity is simply existing and not giving a fuck how other people expect you to live. There’s almost no point in discussing it more as the left is already very comfortable with discussing the idea that you are who you are and you can be proud of that. That message is literally everywhere.
Toxic masculinity has to be discussed because people are being made to confuse being toxic with being “strong” which is something the right is creating. Their image of a “real man” is toxic.
It’s like the whole “racist right winger” or “neonazi” labels given to a politician, but then some random right winger gets all bent out of shape as if they were called a Nazi… They weren’t even part of the conversation, they decided to take on that guilt. It’s the same with toxic masculinity. If you’re not expressing the things that are discussed within that subject then they aren’t talking about you, you’re more than likely “performing” normal masculinity. It’s not the fault of the people having the conversation that someone else chose to feel offended by it when it wasn’t about them at all.
Interesting to assume people like Tate didn’t exist before. They just changed their rhetoric and added “anti-feminist” to their agenda since that’s trendy in certain circles now. These people existed already in much greater numbers in the past.
Masculinity is not the centre of the discussion of the left or even feminism, though. It’s just what certain people want to make out of it, which is exactly what the quote above is referring to.
Advancing rights for women in general spans a broad spectrum of intersectionality with masculinity just being one fraction of it. You can look up how many feminists are actually talking about masculinity unprompted and you’d be surprised how infrequent it is. It is a certain group of people with an often anti-feminist agenda who try to make it seem as if masculinity was somehow the main hook of feminist discussion.
Most leftists and feminists want emancipation for men as well, with that they mean the emancipation from gender roles for everyone.
What is “normal masculinity”?
You know, protecting your wife and kids if it comes to that, not being an domestic abuser, etc.
Oh, my bad - these are obviously toxic examples! Or, idk, women can do both also? /s
I’d then challenge you to come up with some examples of normal feminity that men can’t also do, since that’s obviously an exclusionary factor.
Defending others has nothing to do with being “masculine”.
I grew up in a Calvinistic worldview where every week you were reminded you were utterly disgusting in the eyes of God and simply by being born you deserved to be tortured more brutally than the English language can adequately express because you had by virtue of being human inherited original sin, and the only way you could get rid of it is if you had been predestined to be saved by Jesus (who did not come to save everyone, only a select few). Anyone can imagine the horrible effect this polar opposite of therapy has on rates of mental illness in that community. This kind of worldview was popular with the English Dissenters (those famous ‘persecuted pilgrims’ belong to this category) who later crossed the Atlantic in large numbers and I think I can see its unpleasant legacy in American political thought both left and right.
If there is one idea I could delete out of existence it’s this notion of original sin in both its religious and secular forms. I would make it unlawful to tell a child that they were born guilty of anything simply for existing or that guilt can be inherited from anyone because of how psychologically harmful this is. While it’s usually not the intention there exists a trend that de facto results in telling boys they’re guilty of various things simply for existing, and then in the same breath we act surprised when scumbags like Tate are hoovering up their attention instead of everyone telling them what a piece of crap they are for being born. Manly qualities in my mind are qualities like physical and mental strength in the face of adversity, having the moral courage to make difficult decisions for the good of a group, a deep sense of good sportsmanship, being willing and able to take risks when required, that sort of thing. The left should be all over that as its history is littered with such examples!
like, there isn’t a non-partisan stance towards masculinity
I keep feeling that there’s a disaster being brewed there, the only people paying attention to young boys seems to be the alt right, and there’s a need for this which everybody seems to dismiss, every single one of the old style support structures for masculinity have been dismantled over decades, and while they were right to be dismantled all these boys still need the support to actually grow into decent people, and no one is giving it, and these crazies have noticed and are using it as breeding ground for soldiers for their cause. The decent people side must create something for them even if it’s to avoid them falling into these dens of craziness.
Exactly. The response among the left seems to be “ha, fuck em” which is a terrible plan
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If only leftists were more than a fringe minority. As of now, we’re stuck with the alt-right Republican grifters and the slightly better Democrats who are doing less than the bare minimum.
You’re confusing the Left with Dems. Dems are not Left. They are squarely Center.
Actually, just don’t fuck em.
I’m sure the 25% figure will plummet when they enter the adult world, realise Andrew Tate is just a sad, loud little man who never found a way to proccess his fathers abuse and that imitating him does the opposite of getting you laid.
At least give them a reach-around
That’s something I have argued about with my liberal friends often. You don’t make allies by telling people that their opinions don’t matter, or that they’re wrong based purely on their sex or color. The left has been dismissive towards men, no… It has been hostile towards men for at least a decade. Masculinity isn’t inherently negative and not all masculinity is toxic. Spreading the belief that it is will only make enemies of people who otherwise would be allies. It is incredibly short sighted to reject normative people and make them feel that they’re less important or that there’s something wrong with them just based off their birth. Also, that is the exact same mentality that the left supposedly wants to overcome, but rather than working towards its end, they’ve just shifted the target. To be clear, I say “liberal” and “left” and that may cause an assumption that I’m a right-wing conservative. I am not.
In my experience, you get full solidarity if you go far enough left. Mainstream politics is all about dividing people into groups and getting them to fight each other. The right convinces men and non-GSMs to hate women and GSMs by blaming all of their problems on them, while the center (Dems are NOT the left) does the same thing, but the other way around. All the while, the top 0.1% make record-breaking profits while we’re distracted.
This is part of the plot in American history X
You also have issues where high-school educated men have not seen any major benefits to any typical liberal or conservative ideology within the past generation.
On the conservative end, the jobs that the men would have gone into have seen wages and benefits stagnate or drop.
On the liberal end, the status of white men in society has dropped to a more level playing field with class status or wealth being a more defining factor, something which they don’t have.
Alt-right conservatives are addressing the economic issues by restricting the work force (anti-immigration) and increasing the jobs in resource extraction (trashing all environmental laws). On social issues, the alt-right head of family is the man.
Leftists could address these issues better by supporting unions more.
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It’s the corporate-friendly “CeNtRiSt” democrats and MSNBC lib-pundits that don’t.
Like Biden’s admin shutting down railway workers trying to collectively bargain. And then a train disaster happened, like, the next day.
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yes, that terrible anti-union Joe Biden, how dare he
https://www.cnn.com/2022/09/15/business/railroad-strike-averted-tentative-deal/index.html
President Joe Biden called in personally to talk to negotiators around 9 pm ET Wednesday, according to a person familiar with negotiations. Biden stressed that catastrophic harm could come to families, businesses and communities if the rail system shut down. Sources within the unions were giving Biden’s call credit for helping to get the deal completed without a strike.
“We’re very proud of what was accomplished,” said Jeremy Ferguson, president of the conductors union and one of the leaders involved in the marathon session. He thanked Biden and Labor Department officials involved in the talks for the deal.
I’m wearing a tshirt that I bought to support a union drive now, actually. Over the weekend, I spotted a table with volunteers supporting the UPS drivers and walked up and asked how I could show support. I poster went in my window. I was wearing a sticker supporting Amazon workers trying to unionize at the time, which they noticed.
It’s a very unique time during my lifetime where union activity seems to be on the rise. A local Trader Joe’s recently formed a union so I went there and individually approached workers and congratulated them. I had a strong sense of who voted yes vs no based on their responses. The ones that were please were really appreciative of the support.
Push hard for unions. Show support for unions in other industries. This is a moment where we might be able to show regular people that we can have collective power.
The left needs to own healthy masculinity and properly address very legitimate issues that disproportionally hurt boys in our society.
Otherwise we will lose a whole generation to toxic male role models in the manosphere.
I read a great WaPo article on this recently. Basically on the left, no one can define healthy masculinity and it’s really opened up a spot for the right wing to swoop in and define it for us.
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The left side of politics has always struggled to bring people along for the journey, they can advocate for people but building a coherent argument and inspiring people to come along for the ride will always be their downfall. They cannot achieve progressive change if they fail to recognize the concerns of the right.
Shame that the concerns of the right are mostly just disguised misogyny, racism and classism.
The left side of politics has always struggled to bring people along for the journey, they can advocate for people but building a coherent argument and inspiring people to come along for the ride will always be their downfall
You’re right. Nothing that’s truly valuable in legislation is simple. It’s hard to turn something complicated into a sound byte without making shit up, and the Left in most countries have to be careful alienating the intellectuals if they start making shit up. We don’t vote for bullshit.
The Right has no problem making shit up and those who vote for them are not really affected by it. When the Notch Baby bullshit was going on (a US thing… there was basically a big hoax about a generation being owed money, and a lot of politicians ran with it), I didn’t know a single right-leaning voter who would give the least bit of a shit that they were voting for people who were willfully taking advantage of the elderly. I guarantee a left-party candidate who pulled that shit would lose by a landslide.
So the Right can bad-faith point out a concern that “toxic masculinity” is just “masculinity” and a good thing. They know the Left can’t soundbyte their way out of it because it’s not a one-liner to say “it’s not about masculinity or feminity, it’s about not being a dick and all of us helping the underdog”. It’s VERY easy to sell people who aren’t the underdog on victim complexes.
John Oliver, John Iadorola from the damage report, Mike Figuredo from the Humanist report, Kyle Kulenski from secular talk, David Doel from the rational national, Sam Seder from the majority report, Lance from the Serfs, Matt Binder from the majority report. Left leaning positive male role models. I’m sure there is more but they stand out as I watch them every week.
Jon Stewart, Trae Crowder, and Beau of the Fifth Column are three more excellent examples of positive male role models.
I fucking love Beau
Who is our Jordan Peterson equivalent?
Reporters and intellectuals can be role models but they are more passive than actively preaching what masculinity should mean.
We’ve also got Brian Tyler Cohen, Hasan Piker, David Pakman as well. Beau Of The 5th Column I know has already been listed, but I feel when it comes to instilling change in the hearts and mind of radicalized young men, he’s up there with Hasan and BTC.
JOHN OLIVER IS A REAL PERSON?
No he is just a meme on r/pics
They do, but they are not mainstream. “Average person” probably never heard of them.
This, want it or not, it is not hard for boys to feel incredibly alienated in the left hemisphere. We gone from “girls have issues too” to “only girls can have issues”. It’s ridiculous, and even more ridiculous when you remember that girls reach their growth spurt sooner than boys, effectively eliminating many of the purported advantages of boys over girl, making them feel even more alienated.
I’m pretty far left and in my entire life I’ve never experienced “only girls can have issues” as more than an extreme fringe statement.
What I tend to see regarding men is how they, too, are victims of toxic masculinity, taught to internalize their emotions until they have literal breakdowns. The Left gives a fuck about that, and it’s one of the cited reasons they have problems with toxic masculinity.
I wonder where you get the impression that “the left” is saying “only girls can have issues”? It feels to me like people have spun this reactionary tale in the backlash to feminism but no one is actually saying that.
It is like every time someone tries to talk about issues women face this is seen as an attack on men. Which I find frankly ridiculous. At the same time, in many cases when people bring up boy’s or men’s issues they will only do so while simultaneously attacking feminist talking points. This is especially prevalent on social media platforms like Reddit and YouTube.
It does seem like anti-feminists and sometimes straight up misogynistic people have monopolized the entire discussion surrounding men’s issues. When you look up information regarding issues men face it is really hard to not end up in a hateful corner of the internet. Some of these sources do not actually have the people looking for help at heart, they are simply anti-feminist and will even go so far as to provide inaccurate information or withhold information just so that they can keep up their narrative.
in many cases when people bring up boy’s or men’s issues they will only do so while simultaneously attacking feminist talking points.
This is very much a talking point by “only girls can have issues” people.
“Men don’t have issues, men’s rights groups only exist to spread misogyny!”
That is a key point of why the idea that men’s issues are not taken seriously is spreading, because simply talking about / focusing on men’s issues quickly gets people labled as misogynists.
This both gets people to stop caring about the idea of misogynism, because “apparently simply talking about men’s issues is misogyny”, and thereby also pushes people to develop more problematic views.
because simply talking about / focusing on men’s issues quickly gets people labled as misogynists.
This is simply not true.
Maybe kid watching too much Andrew Turd or Lobster cult? That’s why de-platforming is so important. These people are genuinely harmful to the world.
Grifters are a symptom, not the cause. I agree with getting rid of them, but more will follow.
As long as young men and boys see that they are discriminated against, devalued, and excluded, there will always be grifters ready to convince them that their problems are caused by some other group of normal people instead of the people actually doing the discrimination and steering the values of society.
I was a “Fox News”-viewing turd in high school, too.
Conservativism mirrored what my parents viewed at the time. Seemed edgy. And offered simple solutions to all of life’s problems.
Then I grew up. Five years later, I was voting for Barack Obama and terrified of Sarah Palin.
That is actually an easy trap to fall into because that was the environment you were raised in. I am glad you got out of that trap when many do not.
In turn, my parents are gradually escaping.
My dad was a Never Trumper who we gently led out. And Jan 6th made him an “independent” (he votes for Democrats now). My mom is a loyal Republican (somehow)… but agrees Trump is an arrogant piece of garbage and not the horse to bet on.
Then I grew up.
No one just “grows up”. You had a set of experiences that allowed you to think beyond the confines of what your parents taught you.
Most never do.
It’s not a natural process.
And this is why Republicans are so opposed to higher education. My dad grew up in a conservative household - like, so conservative that my grandad would respond to the question of who he was going to vote for with “I’m a Republican. I vote for the nominee,” and it wasn’t until he went to college and met people with life experiences that were different from his that my dad began to question the things he was told about the world when he was growing up.
It’s a lot easier to convince you that your life sucks because
Jewishbrown immigrants are taking all the jobs and women won’t date you because, actually, they’re the sexist ones (and it definitely has nothing to do with the fact that you treat them like sex toys) if you’ve never been beyond 40 miles of where you were born and have never been outside of a town where everybody looks like you.
They’ll grow out of it when they enter the job market. I was conservative in high school too until I moved out of mom and dads and realized that our society has created nothing worth conserving for anyone under the age of 50. Nothing will make you radical like realizing you will likely never be able afford a home and children.
Depends on their location imo
Rural area, you’re more likely to grow INTO it when you enter a blue collar job.
Yeah the idea that republicans give a shit about blue collar workers is hilarious.
Possibly. I did blue collar work for years after university and became more left leaning.
I feel like the part of the country matters a lot.
I don’t know. I don’t have any answers, but I’m not this optimistic. Our education system has been in decline, many (not all) people aren’t as educated as they should be, and might not even realize they are wrong. Average people are kinda stupid.
I was a card carrying Libertarian after high school, before my sense of empathy developed more fully.
Same. The world seemed so simple back then, until I matured. I suspect a lot of people are emotionally stuck
I can also relate, a classic libertarian utopia sounds great until you realise poor people exist. I think a lot of individuals are just afraid of personal growth because it often means admitting you were wrong.
Well, it’s not something you just institute overnight. Just like with communism, if you try that you’d end up with a pretty big mess, because people will manipulate the framework for their own personal gains. Instead it’s something you work towards slowly, through education and efforts to balance the system until it’s not really needed anymore.
The keys always have to be:
- People legitimately caring about their neighbors, and supporting each other through good times and bad
- People working towards progress for the sake of progress and their community, not for personal gain
Our actions weave into the fabric of society, and future generations are formed from that same fabric. It takes time to shift how our nature manifests into actual behavior.
Humans don’t work that way and never will.
That is just capitalist propaganda
Are the history books capitalist propaganda too, then? Because I’m not aware of any instance in history when a stable society emerged with no governing authority and no one taking advantage of anyone else. To my knowledge, at least one of those things always ended up happening, and quickly.
Most humans are selfish and jealous by nature. Not all, but most, and it only takes one jerk to ruin it for everyone. Any system that ignores this fact, and does not have some strategy for dealing with it, is doomed to failure.
The only way I foresee your vision ever becoming reality is if a technological revolution enables a post-scarcity economy, as seen in some science fiction like Star Trek. This could remove the main driver for humanity’s selfishness. Maybe. But we aren’t even close to having the technology needed to accomplish that.
In many ways I still consider myself libertarian, but moreso in anti authority leaning than Republican but with a cooler label. Many of my peers in highschool and university clicked with the pro guns, pro expression sentiment, but when it came actually letting queer people and religious minorities live their lives, or allowing women control over their own bodies and healthcare, they always seemed to side with the Authoritarians in power threatening the to restrict these people. Not to mention many of them had no problem with authority as long as it came from a corporate entity or oligarch.
I still identify with the term Libertarian, but have stopped using it because it truly doesn’t represent what it was supposed to mean anymore.
There is such a thing as a “Libertarian Socialist”, which seems to be what you are looking for. A lot of Libertarian Socialists also just call themselves “anarchists”; and “anarchism” essentially just means something like “anti-authority” or “anti-hierarchy”.
If you want to maybe explore it a bit:
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Homage to Catalonia is a book written by George Orwell where he tells of his time in Spain fighting alongside the anarchists and socialists in Spain (against the fascists supported by Hitler and Mussolini, and against the republicans backed by Stalin).
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The Dispossessed written by Ursula K. Le Guin; it’s a sci-fi story about a society living on a moon, who are anti-capitalists and supposedly anarchists (whether they are anarchists or not is one of the focus points of the story).
If you just want to read theory instead, you can also search for Pyotr Kropotkin, and Emma Goldberg.
Thanks. Seeing Orwell’s name attached to one of your recs is a good sign.
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yeah it’s a shame that libertarian basically means closeted republican these days
is there a better term?
I’d consider myself pretty libertarian-minded in the whole ‘you live your life and I live mine’ style, but not in the ‘let corporations do whatever they want to workers and the environment’ style
Do you believe in a democratic government undertaking tasks of social benefit? Like building roads and rails
as long as the money isn’t being wasted or contracts being handed out to companies owned by politician’s friends, yeah
I often go with Anti-Authoritarian when describing my beliefs. I’ve played around with the Anarchist label as well, though it seems to have the same affect on Communists who want an edgier label (which is ironic, considering both groups have clashed with each other throughout history)
I like many concepts of Anarchy, but until we have Star Trek levels of free unlimited power and food, I don’t think it would work.
There have been examples of anarchy working. Unfortunately, most of the ones I know of were around during World War 2 and got crushed between 2 larger opponents, or backstabbed by one of them.
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Anarchists - and other socialists in Catalonia - during the Spanish Civil War, were stuck between the fascists and the republicans (Soviets), sided with the Soviets and ended up being betrayed. Homage to Catalonia by Orwell is a good book about the civil war and the anarchists.
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Korean People’s Association in Manchuria were destroyed by Japan a few years before WW2 during a war between China and Japan IIRC, and apparently some of its leaders were also killed by “Korean communists” (the same ones that ended up forming North Korea).
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The Black Army of Ukraine fought the Red and White armies at separate times; one time they joined the Red Army against the White Army, and were betrayed.
You might have noticed a pattern there, which is also why a lot of anarchists are not found of Marxist-Leninists or Stalinists.
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And honestly, ‘conservative’ shouldn’t be a bad word either. But it’s been morphed into this fascist hate machine, and it’s hard to see what you’ve become when you’re on the inside.
It’s not like Democrats are screaming to tear down the Walmarts and Dollar Generals, and bring back local businesses and repairable products. Neither side is all that great, it’s just that one is teetering on genocidal. I’m not saying don’t vote democrat, because you absolutely have to if you want to head off what’s coming. But we need to start looking at this problem more holistically, if we don’t just want to perpetuate it in future generations.
And honestly, ‘conservative’ shouldn’t be a bad word either. But it’s been morphed into this fascist hate machine
The term “fundamentalist” was coined because “conservative” was a bad word, and that was over a century ago. Conservative hate is nothing new.
Source? I never heard fundamentalism was coined as an alternative to saying conservative. Fundamentalism could be described as conservative but I don’t think the 1920s fundamentalists were trying to avoid that in any way.
That’s called being a Democrat
A “Democrat” is a member of the “Democratic Party” of the USA, it is not a political ideology in itself. Democrats are usually economic Liberals and don’t care that much about workers or the environment, but some are Social Democrats (Bernie Sanders). They are also usually socially progressive.
The Republican Party is also composed mainly of economic liberals; however, they are typically socially conservative.
Democrat isn’t really an ideology though as much as it’s a coalition of voters. They can be anyone from Communists and socialists to conservatives who don’t align with the Republican party. The majority of politicians within the party tend to be free market liberals akin to Clinton, with a few European style Social Democrats akin to Bernie Sanders and AOC. As someone who supports gun ownership and rejects the existence of corporate welfare and monopolies, I might not identify with many of the politicians within the Democratic party. Likewise I take issue with the Republican’s stances towards human rights, the establishment of religion, and putting the legitimacy of elections into question. I might be more comfortable with voting Democrat, but the party’s platform would not be how I would describe my ideology.
Republicans love co-opting things after all. Libertarians in that sense are just republicans who realized saying that is an automatic red flag.
In the 2022 Monitoring the Future survey, the largest group of senior boys, more than two-fifths, claimed no politics at all, answering the liberal-conservative question with “none of the above” or “I don’t know.” Nearly one-fifth identified as moderate. Only 36 percent selected liberal or conservative as an ideology, and only there did the trend emerge.
I’m not as sold on “trending conservative” as I am “undecided on political ideology” +/-60% didn’t say liberal or conservative.
When I was in high school I was convinced I was conservative. It actually was the reason for a relationship ending at the time. But after I graduated I realized how left leaning I actually was. No one knows who the hell they are in high school.
So incredibly true
Yeah, me too. Though I was taken on by the whole “radical liberal left being oversensitive” thing. I thought of women as equal, but the “femimazis” were extreme. I thought non-heterosexual and non-binary were a bit odd, but they can do what they want, why should I care, but I was the “LGBT propaganda” was too much. I thought people fleeing from wartorn regions deserved another chance, but the “sjws are just letting anyone and everyone in, and they can do whatever they want because otherwise it would be racism”.
I would call myself right wing, but practically all of my opinions were very far from it because my youtube overloaded brain thought that the “left” were just a bunch of idle people getting looking what to get offended by today. Only later at uni did I find out how overblown the whole “SJW” youtube thing was, and how much more insane and damaging the other extreme was.
And I believe that this is very much the case, people in school aren’t “right wing” because they carefully thought about life and society, but because all they hear about the “left” is this comically exaggerated notion that they’re touchy freaks who just want to scream how they’re oppressed by everything. Ironically, what got me out of the stupid right wing youtube company was left wing youtube with hour long videos exposing how that “SJW” narrative is just manipulation. But by the time they make one long detailed video exposing some false story, 1000 more of them pop out.
Honestly, the large portion of the internet is just poisonous, especially youtube. The sooner people learn to think and examine sources (use the internet), the better off we’re all be.
My first election out of high school I voted for a right wing candidate because that’s what my Dad voted for, but also because I was entrenched in Christian ideaology and patriarchal propoganda.
After that I started paying a bit more attention to politics and slowly moved to the left with a few leaps along the way. Nowadays I find the Labor party of Aus to be about as conservative as I can stand. I can barely hide my disgust with anything to the right of them.
Real life experience can be far more radicalising than any immature ideas you inherent in high school.
Edit: My major leaps were: Having an employer illegally underpay me, seeing my friends lose ‘stable’ jobs in 2008, having a close friend come out as gay, leaving the church, volunteering with unhoused people, living in the UK, living in a rental controlled by a landlord with over 100 properties, and doing disaster relief work.
Yeah living through the fifth once-in-a-generation crisis in this generation is powerful left-wing propaganda.
I bet this happens to a lot of people unless they get sucked into a YouTube/truthsocial echochamber rabbit hole.
I totally could have gone down that route if I were younger. I spent a good amount of time reading conspiracy theories online before YouTube existed.
What effect did the UK change your political views?
I spent nearly every dollar I had saved to live in London, and don’t think I’d ever seen such visible displays of wealth disparity once I got there. I got a good paying job but often struggled to save and pay all my bills.
I got to live through the Brexit debate while living behind a chip shop in a poorer, multicultural neighbourhood and heard all the bullshit about immigration being directed at brown people while I worked there as an immigrant myself but because I was white I was largely accepted.
I learned a new level of contempt for the pointless wealth of the monarchy and had to deal with a boss who was plainly bad at his job but because he had an OBE everyone around me worshipped him like he could do no wrong.
I also worked for some very large companies and realised they aren’t anything special, just willing to exploit more people.
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Oh I see, yes that sounds eye opening
I partially blame the Left for not addressing mental health issues for our younger boys and men and not doing a better job at expressing what healthy, happy masculinity actually looks like. So the likes of Andrew Taint, Joe Rogan, Matt Walsh and the likes basically swooped in and took that over.
I’ve got a 15 year old nephew who’s starting his Sophomore year in like a week. I’ve already heard him say some rather disturbing extremist right-wing shit, and sadly his father fucking sucks at being a father so correcting him hasn’t been easy for me (I’m the aunt, his mother is not currently in the picture). And he says this shit with his little sister around too.
It’s not the fault of the left that the right creates propaganda.
Propaganda is really effective on everyone and they’ve had the help of algorithms that boost anger inducing material which leads one from “self help” alpha jerk all the way to “the left are demons that want to kill babies.”
It’s not the fault of anyone other than the propagandists. :/
That’s not what they’re saying, they’re saying- very correctly- that whereas the Right has cultivated a pipeline for reaching out to young men via these propagandists, the Left has not. We’re largely ceding the conversations about young male disaffection to those kinds of Right-wing assholes who tell them it’s the fault of the Left.
Vaush, for example, is not a good resource for someone who’s just some awkward high school kid who knows nothing about politics. He’s not speaking to that kid’s concerns, he’s ranting (very justifiedly, but that’s irrelevant) about the manosphere. If you look at the videos by the manosphere, they’re trying to touch on points of interest to young men as a group. If you look at the Left-wing YTers, they’re talking to people who already dislike the manosphere: “Conservatives don’t understand Manga or Anime” (Tim Poole) vs “This incel video is pathetic” (Vaush).
I think a key problem is that for many of us on the Left, it’s very difficult to understand (or believe) that someone could look at what right-wingers are doing and not care, so we think it’s just an issue of exposure. What we forget is that they have to click on the video/ article/ podcast first, before they get exposed to the content, and right-wingers are sitting there putting out the exact opposite stuff about the Left (“Watch these crazy liberal college feminists getting owned by Ben!”) To someone who is disconnected, it does look like it’s just 2 equal sides ranting about each other.
So if I don’t know who Andrew Tate is, I’m not going to click on a video about why he’s bad.
But manga and anime? I love those! I’ll click on that. “Why young men feel like no one cares?” I’m an angsty young man, I’ll watch that! Then that video leads to the “Why Socialism is Destroying America!” one, and down the rabbit hole they go.
Right. While I feel for what OP has said, it’s like the right can be as nasty as they want to be while it’s the left that’s charged with picking up the pieces. I don’t know what the answer is but it can’t be let the right do and say whatever.
Because the right does such a good job addressing male mental health?
Maybe his parents (you and his dad I suppose) should monitor who he follows on social media a bit better?
It’s not that they are good at addressing it, they’re they only group that vocally addresses it at all.
Young white men are a group, a large group, in the US and when then ONLY people saying “hey its okay to be YOU SPECIFICALLY YOUNG WHITE MAN”, their social media algorithms tend to lean toward that.
I’m pretty liberal because of my own life experiences, and my youtube feed is just filled to the brim with Andrew Tate, Walsh, Shapiro, Peterson, Jones, etc. I happen to find Jor Rogan funny and that’s about the furthest right I go, but because of that I’m can’t not open youtube and be subjected with this type of content that, more or less, targets my demographic.
Personally, I see it as a grift. To me, these people are just making money selling bullshit by the bulk, and young white men happen to both have money and no other ‘pick me’ iconography.
I’ve dealt with suicidal ideation and mental health problems all my life, and Peterson comes on and tells me it’s okay to feel emotions, but then immediately starts talking about how trans people will never be happy and should never try to transition. I’m pretty cognitive and can see its more or less book sales for him and he’s talking about an experiences he’s never had, but a 15 year old isn’t quite as cognitive nor has had the same level of life experience as my age group
The left is why kids aren’t working in factories. The right and center have done everything to keep us from remembering that fact.
If you want role models on the left there’s plenty of them. You just won’t find them as easily on YouTube.
Yes, but there aren’t figure heads targeting this demographic with a specific rhetoric/ideology.
When they teach it in school about kids working in coal mines and meat factories, they don’t teach the politics that went along with it.
No, unfortunately they don’t teach it.
I didn’t really understand it until I read The People’s History of the U.S. a few decades later.
I would love it if his father bothered to put in effort in raising my eldest nephew, but that isn’t going to happen sadly.
And I never insinuated the right was doing a good job???
Well you blamed the left when honestly that’s about two people in Congress, the liberals are centrists whose job it is to keep another general strike from happening.
Why not blame the right? They’re the ones literally pushing toxic shit on our kids and wanting to start child labor back up.
I sure as hell don’t blame the left. Without the left my kid and your nephew would be working in a mine or factory. And you and I would still be working 80 hours a week to survive.
You completely misunderstood my original post, and from the looks of it, you’re doing it on purpose. Bye.
You literally blamed the left for your kid not getting mental health care. Was the first thing you said yet I misunderstood?
Yeah, good riddance lady.
… what’s wrong with Joe Rogan? The traditional media has smeared him because they don’t like that CNN plus shat the bed and they’re sad about it.
He’s just a ‘normal’ dude. The fact that you put him in with he likes of Andrew Tate, or Peppa Pig fame, says a lot about what you’ve been led to believe.
I’m not a big fan of Rogan, but I don’t dislike either, I’m just not a podcast person very often. The guy just has conversations with all kinds of people.
I think the main issue with Rogen is that while he provides a platform for voices across the political/social spectrum (which is great), he does very little to challenge his guests and generally goes with the flow. This means that people making false claims or dog whistle statements are being taken at face value alongside people making good faith arguments, which grants those bad actors some amount of undeserved authenticity.
So no, he is not nearly as bad as Andrew Tate etc; but he has a lot of exposure and clout that he does not always bring to bear in the name of true and honest discussion. Also the whole RFK debate thing is really poignant here as it’s a typical example of taking two “balanced” perspectives on vaccines and assuming that they both deserve to be at the same table, when in reality the anti vax movement largely gets by without any scientific evidence and isn’t a reasonable position to hold.
Seriously? https://sopuli.xyz/post/1806608
Rogan is a dumbshit winger troll.
Lol wow.
Right but 62% are neither which is more important because both parties are ass and the kids know it.
This doesn’t make mention of a party, only political leanings. Sure, the parties sometimes represent those sides, but that’s not what’s asked. It probably did play a role in the answers though.
It’s kind of silly to pretend like “liberal” and “conservative/right” don’t have corresponding political parties in the US. Maybe they’re not supposed to, but that’s not reality.
They do to an extent, but I was correcting that you can not agree with the part liberal or conservative because there are other options. Sure, when it comes time to vote you have to choose to vote for one of the two parties (in order to be counted), but just because the parties are bad shouldn’t change the way you describe your own political leanings.
Yeah ok, but highschool boys are fucking dumb as shit too. It’s probably the same bunch of idiots that followed Andrew Taint
I mean that’s the problem, isn’t it? What is it about these assholes like Tate that appeals to young men?
The same thing fascism seemingly has to offer: easy solutions to complex problems.
I’m not saying (especially white) young men are treated unfair but as one myself it’s easy to come to the conclusion as you do feel a rift between fulfilling conservative societal norms you grew up with and learned from your elders for which isn’t really a space left anymore except of conservative circles so you do kinda feel like being privileged is a burden because you think you have to fulfill more expectations than other groups and I think there’s a lack of addressing this in public discourse without simply demonizing young males for trying to find their identity in a way that also includes a healthy relationship with one’s own masculinity. If you discuss this I feel like you’re quickly drifting into incel and alpha bullshit territory because they’re the only ones addressing those problems but of course they don’t offer actual solutions because that’s not really part of their business model.
It’s important to recognize that fascists are not evil comic book villains. If you are a member of their ethnostate they will come off quite pleasant. They will say “You are beautiful, you are kind, you are wise. We are building a utopia and we’d like you to join us.” Then eventually they will say “We cannot build a utopia because they stand in our way. They are ugly, they are cruel, they are stupid.” And then before you know it you are building gas chambers.
It’s also fun to be in a group and authorian regimes usually have nice aesthetics. It can be very tempting when a group includes you and you think you’ll have a purpose as a human being by joining.
Maybe we should found a fascist group just without the fascism and it’s including for everyone where everyone dresses nice and we march together and some guy holds energetic speeches about random stuff like that one time his dog ate an entire birthday cake and there’s a specific greeting we use.
Unfortunately fascism can’t actually work without an “other” to be a scapegoat. Fascism frames history as the struggle of an infallible ethnostate towards prosperity. Therefore any imperfection in the state is the result of the influence of “others” working against the state. Without an “other” fascists would actually need to take responsibility for society’s shortcomings.
aw hell, uniforms by Hugo Boss?
Power fantasies.
I’ve been a pubescent young man once and we have all been idiots laughing at stupid shit, trying to be edgy. I guess that number will change once they’ll get more mature.
College (if they go), is when these boys pulled out of their comfort zone and thrown into a huge mixer with a huge variety of new people and ideas. I imagine there’s a reason they only see this trend in “high school boys”.
Colleges are also seeing less men succeed in the environment. Men are struggling in the classroom and with mental health.
I think we all agree young people are getting a shitty deal with today’s society. It’s hard to think positively for them.
@Kata1yst @trashhalo @VanillaGorilla Yep. Hence why conservatives keep calling college “woke” and “liberal indoctrination.” Funny how reality and not living in denial makes people more left.
That’s when I went from being conservative to liberal, for sure. Still moving further left, 10 years later.
I understand that self identification is more convenient than a list of policy questions, but I kind of wonder how many of them count as conservative by the standards of twenty years ago, or even by the standards of people twenty years older than themselves
Do these conservative teenagers believe that gay people shouldn’t be allowed to marry? That a war against Islam is a good idea? That wives should submit to their husbands?
I had a young woman, maybe 17 last semester, turn in a paper --it was a 12 page research/argumentative paper about why gender complementarianism (ie woman and men have different, distinct roles with men at the top). She’s a good student, a good writer, but literally she’s heard this set of morals from the pulpit her whole life… So like… Yeah. I read another young man’s paper where his takeaway from 12 Years a Slave was “wow, not all slave owners were abusive monsters–some were pretty kind and treated their slaves like family.” The kids are as alright as the rest of us are.
The conservative platform in the US doesn’t exist. At this point, conservative is a bucket term for, “not progressive.” Most conservatives are on the right, but not all. Most conservatives are Republican leaning, but not all. Most conservatives are opposed to socially progressive change (e.g. expanded LGBT rights) but not all.
Basically any policy position you could point to will fail to capture a significant number of modern conservatives.
