Oh so what? It's the Loony Left. What would happen if the Level Left stopped giving a fuck? And laughed?
Say no to toxic ideologies and language. Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay
Oh I'm sorry, are you talkin' to me? 'Cause I don't give a fuck. - Wanda Sykes
Once I hit fifty, I discovered a new feeling: I just don't give a fuck.
Stuff that upset or worried me when I was younger no longer did. Especially what people thought of me. The older I got, the less I gave a fuck.
I didn't transform overnight, but I attribute it to two sources: Hormonal changes as I journeyed blithely into middle age, and a few years later, a turn toward Buddhist psychology. Right around the (Red) dawn of the Trump years (natch), I realized I was still too-easily triggered about politics and current events. I started or engaged in too many fights on Facebook, so I began de-triggering by exposing myself to a wide variety of reprehensible assholes. Thank God/dess for Twitter!
I sought people I couldn't stand - Republicans, ISIS fanboys, misogynists, man-hating feminists, white and black racists. I'd scroll through their tweets until I couldn't resist telling some #$%&* off and then stop--before I tweeted something provocative. Or, I'd write the tweet but not post it.
Today I still occasionally challenge assholes, but mostly only if something needs to be said. Like, can I add something no one else is saying? Is it promoting my agenda of encouraging people to take back their power and be stronger, or do I just want to feel superior-to-thou?
I'll admit I still go for the quick hit of self-righteous assholery, but I'm doing it less.
So what if they call you a nasty name?
I challenge left-wing fascists. Some argue only the right can be fascist but I disagree. Taken to the extreme, which the left has done for several years, the far left has come to greatly resemble the far right, its primary distinction being merely who they hate.
I find a near-identical religiosity on the far left one finds in the right's fundamentalist Christianity. 'Wokeness' looks rather a lot like a medieval Inquisition if thou fallest short of their strict, merciless, dogmatic ideology.
Dared to say that a person who menstruates is a woman. “A Martyr To Fanaticism” from the Library of Congress with no known copyright restrictions
The left tosses around pejorative labels so indiscriminately it stops sounding like an insult about fifteen minutes after first use. And when you no longer give a fuck, the label ceases to hurt.
I got called a racist the other day on Twitter by a gender ideology nut who took exception to my pointing out that the trans movement's misogyny against biological women isn't only a white thing, plenty of POC transwomen share their misogyny.
Simply mentioning race triggers the response algorithm in far-left haters. They're like Pavlov's dogs.
Bet you my bottom loonie the tweeter hates white men, the acceptable racism of the Loony Left.
I don't give a fuck when someone calls me a racist because I know I'm not, although I can't swear I've never been guilty of inadvertent racism, bigotry or bias. But as John McWhorter recently argued on The Glenn Loury Show, maybe we should differentiate between genuine racism and lighter shades of bigotry and bias.
The same goes for the far-left's other overly-broad pet pejoratives. As far as I can tell, their blanket definitions include:
'Racist': Any white person who challenges Kendi-and-Coates-schooled victimhood-oriented antiracists
'Misogynist': Any man who does or says something a 'woke' (victim) feminist doesn't like, including telling her she's pretty
'Transphobe': Anyone who challenges someone who's been a woman about as long as I've been awake this morning
'TERF': Any biological woman who pushes back against narcissist, misogynist transwomen and trans-activists
'White supremacist': Anyone born white, no commitment to genuine white supremacist values required. That's you! (Unless you're not white. Although you may merely be in denial.)
Why do we care what they call us?
It's Twitter, for pete's sake. Or Shitter as I call it when it's on fire with woke holy rollers riled about some ancient blackface disgrace or 'deadnaming' Caitlyn Jenner, as though no one knew who The Olympic Athlete Formerly Known As B***e was.
When I lived in the United States, I was a regular, public, vocal critic of the excesses and hypocrisies of Christian fundamentalism, and Islam after 9/11 with the left's unwillingness to condemn the violence, misogyny and homophobia in Islam for which they readily damned Christians.
Boy did fundamentalist Christians and fundementedlist feminists get mad at me! No Muslims, since in Connecticut we didn't have many.
I stopped giving a fuck.
Sorry folks, but I call out misogyny and crimes against women no matter how popular the perps.
Today, the left has weaponized social ostracism not just to marginalize some, but through a vicious petty desire to destroy lives and careers. They discovered their power when they got its pioneer victim, Justine Sacco, fired for an ill-thought-out sorta racist tweet, one that truly merited no more than a quick meeting with HR: "Remember you're representing the company when you voice a public opinion."
Cancel culture is the left's version of a mass shooting. Lives are pointlessly destroyed for vastly overstated harm.
Cancel-bullies can't do it on their own. Corporate boards are submissive, compliant little kittens when confronted with 'controversy', however manufactured and mild. Unless they're big enough to profit from it, as some have come to realize.
Heineken's "Lighter is better" ad. Racist? Maybe. Intentionally? Things that make you go "Hmmmmm...." No question though, it's lucrative!
Social ostracism literally kills. We evolved as a cooperative group-bonding species for survival. One literally dies without your posse to back you up when the sabre-toothed tiger, the rival cave clan, the street gang, or your psycho gun-wielding ex finds you. It's even more critical now when human connections, already weakened by technology and social media, swing in tatters by an isolating pandemic.
Nothing makes one feel suicidal quite like social ostracism.
'Woke' ideology, whether it's race, gender, LGBTQMOUSE, or Western colonialism, has become as religious in nature as god-based religions. The woke mob isn't allowed to imprison you in stocks in the town square, but they can introduce a permanent black stain on your character and reputation whenever someone enters your name on Google.
What can we do about it?
It's hard to stand up to dangerous religious fanatics, and too many 'social justice' movements have become infected by rabid dogma and a severe allergy to facts, science and evidence-based policy-making. What we need is to become a new breed of intellectual and knowledge-based social justice warriors, ironically, to take on the tiny minds who've come to ally themselves with injustice and human rights abuses.
The first item of business will be challenging the woke True Believers' distrust of Enlightenment ideals of knowledge, reason and rationalism. Among the many bad ideas introduced by post-modernist 'thought' is the notion that scientific reasoning and rationalism are bad because first of all, and obviously, it was pioneered by white European and European-influenced American men. Post-modernists therefore approach knowledge as something constructed; they ask and challenge why it was constructed a certain way.
There's clear value in considering the way biases and prejudices have influenced what is 'known'; especially when dealing with subjects requiring human interpretation. Some can't be observed or tested, like a past historical event or cataloguing biological evolution. Human bias and error are ever-present and something historians and anthropologists, among others, must seek and eliminate.
But it's quite another thing when leftist extremists deny clear-cut science and history, along with our own observation. Like claiming women never lie about rape when clearly sometimes they do, or that genitals don't define your sex.
John Cleese explains the science to a wannabe.
Biology is real. Even with a constructed vagina.
The second item of business is to laugh more.
The Loony Left's too-casual labels hurled like a senior citizen tossing seed to park pigeons dilute the meaning of real-world prejudice and discrimination, enabling genuine bigots to brush them off.
He's feeding the pigeons because he hates ducks and geese. And squirrels. Species-ist! CC0 2.0 image by Laura Hadden on Wikimedia Commons
They're making those of us still on the rational side of liberalism look bad. Let's call ourselves the Level Left! It's up to us to hold our own accountable for their often toxic language.
We can stop fearing our own True Believers, and re-apply the power of their labels to the truly deplorable by laughing at their current misapplications. By refusing to be shamed because some overprivileged twit calls you a TERF or a misogynist.
Hopefully you're not actually racist, sexist or transphobic! One danger of laughing at the Loony Left is missing the occasional moment when they do have a point. We don't want to become the genuine bigots shrugging it off. Even the Dalai Lama changed his heart a bit on homosexuality when challenged by San Franciscan gay activists in 1997.
The Level Left can reclaim language from those who abuse it with humor. Not all lefties support 'woke' extremism, just as many on the right aren't all Bible-thumpers and MAGA lynch mobs.
The powerful fear humor because it calls out hypocrisy and holds it up for public ridicule, and there's nothing those whose business is public ridicule fear more. The best way to fight our extremists is by laughing at their labels, and their hypocrisies. We can't stop them from calling us names but remember what your mama told you about sticks and stones. Nothing takes the power from a so-called insult quite like shrugging it off.
What the woke powerful fear almost as much as getting 'called out' themselves is the normalization of the marginalized. Humor takes the power of fear of the 'Other', and when we can all laugh together we all become less scary to each other. Dave Chappelle's transgender friend Daphne Dornan pointed out how being able to make jokes about the transgender community normalizes them, and makes them less 'those people' and more 'one of us'.
That may play a large role in why the movement is so famously thin-skinned.
Social justice movements, all about championing the marginalized, suffer from narcissism, but the trans movement appears to be one of the worst, which calls their motivation into question: Is it really about encouraging acceptance of transitioners, or would they rather preserve their current power to control the language and narrative by shutting down opposing opinions, particularly from women?
Once we normalize the truly marginalized with humor, we take the power from those who misuse it and encourage the less courageous to step out of the shadows, join us and publicly agree: Yes, this is bugshit crazy!
And it all starts with, as Wanda Sykes would encourage you, not giving a fuck!
Whatever, girlfriend." Free for public use image
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