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>"And in the meantime, it will tell one part of the poor that they are oppressed by the other part. That part, the part that cannot afford to “prove they are anti-racists,” will eventually give up any attempt at conforming to the rigged moral game. They’ll look to people who can help them make sense of this nightmare, give them false hope of a better life, and assure them they are not the problem they are being told they are."

This is so exactly right, thank you for being another voice of sanity.

(I am a new subscriber, per the recommendation of Paul Kingsnorth. I think of myself as an old fashioned liberal, but marxist Freddie deBoer says that's not what a liberal is anymore, so I what do I know.)

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That Jozua guy is full of shit though. Zionism is not an ephemeral phenomenon in anyone's head. It's part of actual imperialism that is actually destroying lifes as we speak, and being against it seems pretty old school left to me. So is burning flags.

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Another excellent post.

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Another good one. An observation from me though, which you can take or leave: both this post and the last spend a lot of time worrying around what 'the left' is, and whether or not the 'woke' crowd are part of it. As someone who was a fellow traveller with 'the left' for a long time in my younger days, and now tries to avoid labels as much as possible, I see this as part of the problem.

Another way of saying this is to ask: does it matter what any of these labels say? What would happen if you abandoned them all and judged ideas and people on their merits? One of the things I always found most objectionable about the 'left', even in the days when, as you say, it was actually concerned about the global corporate economy, was its obsessive tribalism. perhaps as you are just extricating yourself from this cult, this still hangs around your neck, and you worry too much about who is in or out?

While I see where you're coming from, I don't think it works to say, 'ah, wokeness isn't the left, the left is this other, better, thing.' Not least because, in reality, the left has almost always been an 'urban middle class movement'. The Sans Culottes made up perhaps 10% of the French Revolution, for example, and that revolution's leaders were mostly aristocrats. The Bolsheviks were intellectuals and immigrant agitators from well off backgrounds. Che Guevara was the son of a wealthy bourgeois doctor with a private income. 'The people' in most cases are both more conservative (small c) and more powerless than their supposed spokespeople, which is why things like the Vendee happen.

It helped me a lot when I saw that the left has always been an elite movement, mostly wanting to enact change from above. I try these days to distinguish between revolution (elite leftism) and rebellion (usually ground-up populism.) Not that 'the people' are necessarily inherently virtuous, but at least they can speak for themselves.

Maybe the left are part of the problem too.

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We just experienced this in New York when limousine liberals became pissed off that many Black people voted for Eric Adams, a gun toting cop, for mayor, instead of progressive candidates.

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John Michael Greer has also pointed out that, as is the habit of aging empires, we have overproduced people educated to be part of the professional managerial class. This produces extreme competition for employment and promotion within universities, government offices and companies that want to be seen as progressive. Being more WOKE and dragging down others in the culture wars is a strategy for those struggling for a place at the overcrowded table.

Rita

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Oh, God, yes. Observing these changes, experiencing these changes, has sometimes made me wonder whether I'm just a crotchety old lesbo with an axe to grind. But reading other, articulate and incisive views like this makes me think I am onto something. I remember thinking, thirty years ago, that the education system was going to create problems when the uneducated graduates of it began to assume positions of authority in the culture. Of course it's much more than the education system, but the general sentiment was fairly prescient.

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You might find some actionable items here.

Woke Self-Defense 101

Fight Wokeness & Be the Life of the Party

https://yourunclepedro.substack.com/p/woke-self-defense-101

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