Unpopular Opinions
Dangerous positions and the people who take them
Well, it’s been an eventful month or so since I forgot this stupid blog exists. Certainly, there’s been no shortage of pearl clutching and outrage from my comrades on The Left, most of it appropriate.
“The Left,” as it’s generally defined by Twiberals and talking heads, has met these challenges with its usual bravado: shock, outrage, grandstanding, posturing, frantic tweets, and box upon box of wine. To be honest, I find myself tiring of most of the rhetoric that comes from my particular quadrant of the political alignment chart. It’s all so droll and predictable and powerless.
Anyway, on to the unpopular opinions.
Elon Musk and “Free Speech”: Settle Down, Twiberals
Okay, so a billionaire is buying Twitter. That’s… bad? I guess? Clearly I’m supposed to think it’s bad. My feed full of friends and acquaintances telling me it’s bad. I guess these people didn’t notice that billionaires have owned Twitter since about 6 minutes after it went online.
Or maybe it’s that this particular billionaire has some kind of agenda. He’s talking about rolling back “content moderation” rules that will only benefit Fascists. I mean, I guess that really is bad, or it would be, if the content moderation rules everyone wants to save weren’t already known to suppress Leftist rhetoric much more effectively than Fascist rhetoric anyway.
The worst case scenario is we end up with more jackasses on Twitter saying more hateful and violent things more often. But do you think Twitter’s grudging and spotty enforcement of anti-hate, anti-racist, anti-*phobic, and anti-civil rhetoric is really doing much to help the situation as it is? I’d venture to say it’s really not stopping those messages from spreading.
Twitter isn’t the vanguard of public discourse everyone thinks it is, it’s just a pretentious liberal brunch in digital format. It’s a place for people to engage in gossip about Those People Over There, and that’s really all it is. If you’re worried that it might become a cesspool of Fascist talking points and a haven for open hostility toward marginalized people, then you’re going to shit when you find out about the physical world outside your condo.
If the “Left” (yes, the scare quotes are there because I don’t consider snarky quips on my phone to be revolutionary action) can’t fight Fascism on Twitter, it might as well give up any pretense of fighting it anywhere else. And, honestly, I’m more infuriated by the cowardly neoliberals who run Civil Twitter telling protesters not to protest at Kavanaugh’s and Alito’s houses than by any of the obviously maladjusted *phobes on Twitter. They’re the ones that are holding the reins of actual power, after all. They’re the ones actively kneecapping any sort of coherent, cohesive action from the Left.
And speaking of Kavanaugh and Alito,
Roe v. Wade Overturned: Look What the Berniebots Did
Now, unlike a (marginally different) billionaire buying a (functionally irrelevant) internet website, the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade actually is a bona fide disaster. Not just for the sufficiently awful and immediate reason that it means the lives of millions of Americans just got even more precarious and marginalized, but because the decision lays the groundwork for what is sure to be the revocation of three generations’ worth of social progress in equality.
Not only are abortion rights currently bleeding out on the chopping block, but everything from same-sex marriage to fucking desegregation is currently staring down the business end of the Religious Right’s maniacal power grab. It’s a real crisis. For a lot of very real people who were already endangered.
So, you’d expect the people who are currently in power and very vocally aghast at this turn of events to, I don’t know, do something about it. And, of course, you’d be wrong. Because those people are the Democrats, and the Democrats are allergic to action of any sort (unless it’s hot takes on Twitter, which probably explains why they’re so upset about the Elon Musk thing).
Instead of, you know, swinging the gavels currently held in their weak little hands, the Democrats have done the next best thing: immediately blamed Progressives for all this. If only nine percent of Bernie Sanders voters hadn’t broken for Trump in 2016 (don’t look up how many of Obama’s voters did exactly that, it’ll spoil the surprise), if only Susan Sarandon hadn’t physically barricaded Hillary Clinton inside a room to prevent her from campaigning in swing districts, if only pie-in-the-sky Progressives hadn’t spent 40 years demanding absurd things like “basic human rights codified into actual laws and not just waved around as a wedge issue and used to scare people into the voting booth for decades”, we wouldn’t be in this mess.
Weird how whenever they’re challenged on anything, “centrist” Democrats always hit the people to their Left. I’m sure that doesn’t indicate anything important. After all, when they’re given a chance, Democrats really deliver. Right? We got an infrastructure bill (well, more of a giveaway to the rich, as usual)! We made Stonk Number Go Up (along with fuel prices and rent, but who’s counting)! We even beat COVID!
Wait, actually,
The Pandemic is Still Happening You Idiots
Case numbers are skyrocketing. Turns out Omicron actually isn’t less deadly than Delta. Hospitalizations are up. Deaths are up. Schools are shutting down (where politically expedient). Meanwhile testing is down, funding for tests and vaccines is running out, pharmaceutical profits are out of this solar system, worker protections have evaporated, public health measures are basically illegal, and we’re tracking only a fraction of what’s actually happening.
We have failed ourselves and each other so miserably that nobody’s even calculating how bad it is. It’s just swept under the rug while we all go on as if it isn’t happening. I’d say we’ve stuck our heads in the sand, but that would probably be construed as covering our faces and that sort of thing isn’t really cool this month. Health authorities have completely abdicated all semblance of credibility to private industry as we throw millions of people into the grinder because God forbid that Stonk Number Go Down.
To be honest, none of this is really Joe Biden’s or the Democrat’s fault. After all, we elected them knowing full well that they were corporate sockpuppets bent on saving the Status Quo at all costs. We elected them to Reduce Harm and because they weren’t Mango Mussolini, not because we really expected anything out of them. Thing is, all the stuff we were threatened with if we didn’t elect them, is happening anyway. And thanks to their horrific handling of literally everything, it’s basically a foregone conclusion that they’ll be swept out of office in November regardless of how bad things get (even because of how bad things get).
At this point, I have no real solution. But that’s fine, because if I did have one, most people — even most of my “friends” — would tell me I’m being absurd, alarmist, and Too Extreme. That I should just bide my time and vote, like I and people like me have been doing for half a century. That whatever we do, we have to do it civilly and legally and through the proper channels. Far be it for me to disagree with such demonstrated wisdom. I just hope someone out there figures out how any of that is supposed to help, because I just can’t see it.