Being in this demographic, I don’t get this. How is right wing even an option, how do you tell yourself you’re okay with all the bullshit they’re pushing. I get if you were already right-wing, chances are you’ll stay like this, but how do you even go from ‘everyone should have rights’ to ‘maybe we should cripple ourselves, the rich deserves more’.
My honest opinion. The right pipeline is meeting boys where they are. The left needs to stop pontificating about shit and get on their level.
It’s no different than the fact that the education system as it’s been designed is easier for girls to navigate than boys. Look at post-secondary attendance by gender over time.
This is a problem that has been brewing for decades and we have done nothing to stop it and the right wing despite all their faults are actually engaging these boys where they are.
If you are a parent. Hell if you are a mother, you should be scared as shit at how your sons are checking out of society writ large.
I’m a 48 year old dude with 3 kids. My daughter will be fine. My boys on the other hand? I’m doing my best to make sure they’re adjusted and successful but it’s exceedingly hard.
The down votes on your comment are a head scratcher. No matter what you as a parent (or even young men commenting in this thread) say, that perspective is shouted down as manosphere brainwash propaganda.
It’s almost like retrograde toxic masculinity. Vulnerable young dudes trying to explain why left messaging makes them uncomfortable are being told to man up/grow up/get over it.
anytime the left is criticized by a man, they just scream at you and insult you. they don’t value any input as to why men don’t listen to them anymore.
and if you ask the left what a man is to do… they tell you to fuck off and figure it out, or they just espouse traditional values of masculinity… but also saying how they are wrong and bad and ‘problematic’ those trad values are. the left has no positive agenda for men because it sees me as inherently bad until proven otherwise by their hypocritical values. they just want you to be a traditional man who gives your money to leftist causes, and attributes the struggles and suffering of minorities to systemic issues, but the struggles of men are never systematic. if a man is struggle it’s entire his own personal fault and what he should do is shut up and give his money to people who have it worse than he does.
it’s simple. the left offers young men nothing other than shame and harassment. so why would they want to deal with that? the right at least gives them a goal to strive for and actually acknowledges their problems aren’t their fault.
they are checking out of society because society offers them no reward anymore.
there is no point in be a part of it when you can’t own a home, can’t find a wife, and can’t have kids. all of that has been priced out of the market for any guy who isn’t in the top 10% of income/wealth. average men has no chance at any of that anymore. and they see that and they are attracted to the right because the right says ‘you can and should have those things’ the left says ‘you don’t deserve them’.
I think you’re hitting some good points, but the thing we need to teach these boys is that they shouldn’t be looking towards society for rewards. Society’s rewards have become a gamified rat race, so the way out is men to look inward. Not gonna lie though, that’s easier said than done…
right, let me sit around on my ass and look inwards, while my costs go up faster than my salary.
surely that will fix things.
the fact you think men need to look inwards tells me you come from a position of massive privledge and wealth. those of us who have had to struggle to pay bills, and feared being homeless don’t care about ‘looking inward’ we care about not being broke.
most young men can’t afford their bills dude. no amount of inward emotional work is going to fix that. and they are being told to fuck off for even daring to ask that maybe if they work hard the yshould be able to afford the basics of a life. a home, a family, healthcare, security and community.
and all those things are actively being denied to them by the world. college grad can’t even afford to live with roommates anymore because rents are so high and wages are so low. how is a 24 year old guy ilving at home making 35K a year supposed to feel? while the left endlessly shits on him what a loser he is for not makign 250K a year.
The entire right-wing propaganda goes as: “if you work hard and make smart choices, you’ll become rich too and will be able to exploit others for your benefit”. The rest are seen as passive doomer mob that just aren’t dedicated enough, and so end up subjugated by the alphas who pushed hard to pursue their dream (to dominate others and live a rich life on their backs).
This kind of propaganda works beautifully well on young folks who didn’t yet get to experience just how hard and unlikely it is to build a successful business or high-payed career, especially without compromising on one’s principles.
I spent over a decade thinking “God this sucks, but at least things will get better once the boomers die off.” The worst political blow of my life was realizing that the younger generation also lacked critical thinking skills.
Presumably meaning the percentage. Not all GenX went right, but I will admit I’ve been disappointed in seeing how many around my age did lose any semblance of critical thinking. And some of them very early, so it may not be age at all that’s a factor, but something else that affects people. Maybe millennials have managed to avoid whatever that is.
As a 50 year white guy old who has never voted for a conservative, and always tries to support the most progressive candidate, let me assure you, we exist, and we are tremendously disappointed in our demographic peers.
Tiktok and the like. Millenials grew up at the perfect time, where the internet was at its peak, then it all became consolidated into large echochambers which are more easily manipulated. Generations after millenials don’t remember the internet outside of tiktok, instagram, snapchat etc. they don’t what they missed out on.
That article was about Australia and even then the headline didn’t support the claims. Millennials have always been like 14 points more liberal than Gen X before them, but they haven’t moved more liberal over time.
elder milennials(too much baggage from thier boomer or Xer family members) turned right more than left, the younger ones tend to be left wings, barring some poc, and lgbtq+ are already on the left.
people move to the right when they buy homes and have kids. elder millenials are already there. younger ones haven’t started yet.
all of my friends who have bought a home and had kids have been way more conservative. both political and personally, they want to conserve things and not change things and see development/progress as a threat to themselves, their family, and their finances.
It’s also survivorship bias. Wealthy people live longer, and wealthy people are more conservative. As a cohort ages, the poor liberals die off and the wealthy assholes remain.
It’s also being annoyed and fed up with people harassing the shit out of you for being ‘rich and privileged’ when you live a pretty basic life. I paid for my own undergrad and graduate educations, lived cheap and saved up for 15 years, and finally got a house and some stability in my life.
I can’t tell you how many ‘leftists’ love ot mouth off at me now that I’m some rich privledged asshole. to them i might as well be a billionaire because if i ‘really cared about other people’ i’d let homeless drug addicts live in my spare bedroom or sell my home and give all the money to some women’s shelter. I haven’t taken a vacation in 3 years, meanwhile they are living off mom and dad and trust funds and traveling abroad 3x a year and screaming about how ‘underprivledged’ they are and how anyone who has a nominally better life than them is bad/wrong and they are some heroic struggling figure because they are ‘above’ traditional employment that might actually give them a better income.
It’s the hypocracy and the irony that I can’t stand anymore. When I grew up the left was more about equality and bringing people up, now it’s about tearing everyone else down to boost whomever is the most ‘oppressed’ at the moment.
ironically when leftists focus on economics, and not identity politics social justice bullshit… they get tons of support and votes from men of all ages.
The Boomers designed (and then aggressively defunded) the education system that these kids are being raised in, so it’s not really a huge surprise that they aren’t learning critical thinking.
Then combine that with the social media/advertising landscape that they’re constantly exposed to, and it’s really a losing battle.
One reason why so many are turning bigots, you expressed it yourself: your refusal to consider them on your same level, as intelligent and critical thinkers as you. Somehow everyone is stupid but you (and I don’t mean “you” specifically, rather everyone who approaches discourse in the same way).
I have a graduate degree, been left/progressive my entire life. Only in the past few years have I been told, to my face, that I’m a bigoted ignorance stupid piece of shit. It’s almost as if the left has gone off the rails and basically thinks anyone who won’t vote for them should f off. And they wonder why they don’t get votes or population.
I used to be proud to be a Democrat. Ever since Clinton I’ve been ashamed and all the party has done is double down on their stupid sexist bullshit.
I remember talking about how clinton was a bad candidate and was going to lose in 2016. all i ever got in reply was ‘you’re a sexist piece of shit’. yeah, god forbid i be critical of clinton’s shity campaign, and her crappy policies that alienated huge swaths of america.
Calling our opponents dumb is being polite, or maybe a psychological defense mechanism against the horror of the alternative.
If you are dumb it’s not your fault. You didn’t, know better. If you are ignorant you can learn.
If you are smart and you still made the choices knowing the outcomes, then we have to go to other explanations: greed is the next least bad, and certainly it plays a part, but honestly that doesn’t usually follow. The vast majority of conservative supporters have no chance to benefit from their policies, so we have to go further to find an explanation.
Cruelty. They want the suffering, the death, the destruction of human potential. Or maybe sadism. They enjoy inflicting pain and deprivation.
The mind recoils, so we call them dumb, because the world in which the ignorant masses are being misled by nafarious elites is less soul crushing to contemplate than the world where the masses act out of cruelty and sadism.
Social media is an incredibly strong tool. It started off pretty nice, so we thought once the boomers died out we would be better off and for a while it was looking good, but it has quickly turned into algorithmic slop which can easily feed people propaganda without them even realising it.
but how do you even go from ‘everyone should have rights’ to ‘maybe we should cripple ourselves, the rich deserves more’.
You compare ideal left versus bad consequences of right. They do the reverse. Both of you feel good about your choices.
Both of you don’t see that it is divide and conquer and that the positions of the parties would shift if people started voting differently to allow the elite to choose their politicians.
To overcome this, you can learn to see the strong arguments of the right and the shortcomings of the left.
one side is saying how shit you are and how you deserve nothing. it’s only women who are worthwhile and you should just fuck off and die.
the other side is saying ‘do this and you’ll be successful’, it sucks right now but you will get there if you try.
which one are you going to find more appealing? pretty sure you’re not going to want to hang out with people who tell you how shitty and awful you are, but the people who tell you that you have a shot at a good life.
one side is saying how shit you are and how you deserve nothing. it’s only women who are worthwhile and you should just fuck off and die.
Except this is a right-wing talking point and a misrepresentation of what left-wing ideals encompass.
the other side is saying ‘do this and you’ll be successful’, it sucks right now but you will get there if you try.
Except that’s not what they communicate, because while they offer “solutions” (mostly towards a rather suppressive and overly strict understanding of gender stereotypes) they immediately find in and shift the blame for young men’s problems towards an out-group, such as the “radical left” and LTBGQ people.
In fact, I find it’s the right that actively hates me for just being me because I don’t conform to their idea of what a man is, even though I’m a cis-hetero white male.
“Don’t try to find your own way because this is what you need to be, and everything else is degenerate and shameful.”
dude i am a man. i have been a leftist man my entire life. i don’t wnat to be a part of the left anymore because it’s so pathetic and shameful to be a liberal these days. the left wants me to support them, give them my votes and money… but their political agenda does absolutely nothing to benefit me or men in general. we are told that because of historical oppression we ‘owe’ giving our work/money/time to minorities and women, that we should just endless sacrifice… that’s not how any of this works. and men are not interested in being used and abused and told me to be grateful for it.
what you fail to get is that it is a talking point… a talking point that is absolutely true. one that the left adamantly denies, but is true of the lived experience of tons of men and men are going to listen to who talks to their truth and their experience. not the left which adamantly denies we have any inherent value or worth… to the left our only worth is what we give to women and minorities.
dude the left hates me way more than the right does. that’s been my experinece. i went to college only to get harassed, assaulted and screamed at. people on the right don’t scream at me and tell me how i am a threat for minding my own business at a bar/cafe because my penis is a ‘threat’ to them. i’m glad you have enough white guilt to be shamed into submission, but i don’t. i worked my ass my entire life from the age of 14 and i am sick of being shamed and harassed for simply providing for myself. of being told that i’m an asshole for not giving more money to women and minorities when I was broke as shit and eating expired food. maybe you never had to provide for yourself because you had a well-off family to pay your bills, but a lot of us didn’t.
when i was in college i had rich women and minorities screaming at me how i shouldn’t exist becausei ‘stole’ their opportunity by getting a scholarship and their parents had to pay full tuition. Fuck the left, fuck their anti-penis obsession. men have every right to health and happiness as women do. and until their messaging and political goals become more inclusive, they are going to continue to alienate younger men.
people vote for their own self interest. they don’t vote for the interests of oppressed minority groups.
I’m curious what would be the bar for proper education. Yesterday I was lectured by my fucking dentist (8years of college) on how poor people are all abusing the system and should lose all social protections.
And he’s absolutely not an isolated case. Most of the engineers I manage are exhibiting similar thoughts about the jobless or immigrants. Again, at least 5 years of college.
This shit is a poison. This is being relayed more and more by persons from 26 to 40 and I guess above all around.
It feels like a national sport ; always shit on the one perceived below.
If my dentist ever said stuff like that to me I would tell them to shut the fuck up, and just do your job taking care of my teeth. If you don’t I’ll go to another dentist.
Pretty brave, telling someone who has already admitted they are a sadist to shut the fuck up, right before they get all in your mouth with metal tools!
Just because you do a lot of it doesn’t mean it was a proper education. In the US education is all about making you ready to be useful to “The Economy”, not to train you to be more intelligent.
Yeah, even if someone participates in what would be considered proper education, it doesn’t guarantee they learn from it.
No one is safe from propaganda, and we’re living in the worst propaganda era so far. Who do you even believe nowadays if you are incapable of thinking for yourself? And if you can think for yourself, how much can you trust yourself to not fall for fake or misleading information?
Yeah sure but then it’s not so much about « getting a proper education » anymore. Or the education system is failing us which is even worse because then what’s the way out? How can I / we steer this situation so that people suck less?
Man I’m terrified my kids will end up like that.
The death of the American dream is a big one. Speaking very generally, men want a better future for themselves and are willing to follow whoever promises it, while women are being specifically targeted by conservatives an don’t want anything to do with that shit. The weakness of the American left means that the average person only sees establishment centrism and far-right fascism as options.
I will get down voted for this. But if you want an answer, here’s what I believe happens:
Initially young men were mostly okay with social left, because: “let gay people be gay”, “don’t treat women worse than men”, “don’t be hateful to foreigners” are easy to agree to, they follow the principles of “let people do whatever they want if it doesn’t affect you”, “every human should be treated equally” and “don’t hate entire groups of people for attributes they can’t control, some individuals are good and some are bad in every group”.
However, social left has moved the goalpost. Now it is: “we have to change the rules for the trans”, “we have to give women privilege to compensate for misogyny”, “we have to give minorities privilege to compensate for X-ism” which follow different principles than the first paragraph. And with the moving of the goalpost comes “if you are to the right of the goalpost after being moved, you are a fascist and a Nazi and I don’t wanna hear what you have to say”.
I liked and agreed with the first paragraph a lot. But I don’t like the second one at all. And I believe this happens to a lot more young men.
That being said, I’m not retarded, I would never fote for a right wing party, specially since they are doing the same and moving the goalpost to the right so much that most of them are actually fascists.
You are spot on. This is my personal beef with the left. Young men hate authoritarian bullshit, even if it’s leftist.
Also the same myself. I am now a Nazi because I believe in equality, not inequality based on sex/race/gender. I’ve also personally experience environments where a woman/trans person can assault another person and gets off scot free because they are treated like toddlers, but if a hetero or male person did that, they’d get the cops called on them.
Young men are well aware the world has stacked the rules against them and they are going to support/listen to people who tell them how unfair and fucked up that is.
But the deck is far more stacked against the working class than it is men or women. They need to understand that they are workers first and everything else, gender, race, sexuality, etc, comes after.
I’ve been in the leftmost spaces most of my adult life. Accommodations for nuance have generally cost me a few calories in processing thought and not misgendering people but tha’ts it. It was annoying at times to learn new things but the impact on my ability to experience and navigate the world was nil. The benefits were that i got to have deeper connections with my friends of various genders and ethnicities.
I think if someone’s coming from an unchallenged experience of masculinity that when people ask for accommodation they feel it as a personal attack because they never had to expend a single calorie of energy on it before, and now someone is asking them to.
It also just takes a looooong time (decades even) to get over one’s own insecurities because it’s easy to hide those behind a mask of masculinity. That part takes a lot more effort whereas the manosphere tells you that you don’t have to climb that mountain because actualization is achieved hiding behind that mask.
I think if someone’s coming from an unchallenged experience of masculinity that when people ask for accommodation they feel it as a personal attack because they never had to expend a single calorie of energy on it before, and now someone is asking them to.
This is it.
Equality feels like oppression when you’re privileged.
Me too. leftist spaces used to be about freedom for everyone. Now they are about screaming at everyone who doesn’t agree with whatever the most ‘progressive’ point of view is that they are horrible and awful people.
Like, it’s fine if you wanna be a transgender poly person, but it’s not fine if you want to shit on everyone else who isn’t and act like they are ignorant nazis and spend your days shitting on anyone who isn’t in total agreement with your lifestyle.
Yeah it’s definitely not a monolith. There were always those cis-hating types of spaces around and that’s just counterproductive. Luckily my experience is in the “let’s figure it or together” types of spaces which are far and away the majority. But everyone remembers the most irritating voice which is often also the loudest.
I think there’s also a phase a lot of people go through in their journey where they feel a need to over-express their new identity. That can lead to social growing pains.
Being in this demographic, I don’t get this. How is right wing even an option, how do you tell yourself you’re okay with all the bullshit they’re pushing. I get if you were already right-wing, chances are you’ll stay like this, but how do you even go from ‘everyone should have rights’ to ‘maybe we should cripple ourselves, the rich deserves more’.
Shit’s wild
My honest opinion. The right pipeline is meeting boys where they are. The left needs to stop pontificating about shit and get on their level.
It’s no different than the fact that the education system as it’s been designed is easier for girls to navigate than boys. Look at post-secondary attendance by gender over time.
This is a problem that has been brewing for decades and we have done nothing to stop it and the right wing despite all their faults are actually engaging these boys where they are.
If you are a parent. Hell if you are a mother, you should be scared as shit at how your sons are checking out of society writ large.
I’m a 48 year old dude with 3 kids. My daughter will be fine. My boys on the other hand? I’m doing my best to make sure they’re adjusted and successful but it’s exceedingly hard.
In what way is the education system easier for girls to navigate? That doesn’t make sense to me at all.
The down votes on your comment are a head scratcher. No matter what you as a parent (or even young men commenting in this thread) say, that perspective is shouted down as manosphere brainwash propaganda.
It’s almost like retrograde toxic masculinity. Vulnerable young dudes trying to explain why left messaging makes them uncomfortable are being told to man up/grow up/get over it.
anytime the left is criticized by a man, they just scream at you and insult you. they don’t value any input as to why men don’t listen to them anymore.
and if you ask the left what a man is to do… they tell you to fuck off and figure it out, or they just espouse traditional values of masculinity… but also saying how they are wrong and bad and ‘problematic’ those trad values are. the left has no positive agenda for men because it sees me as inherently bad until proven otherwise by their hypocritical values. they just want you to be a traditional man who gives your money to leftist causes, and attributes the struggles and suffering of minorities to systemic issues, but the struggles of men are never systematic. if a man is struggle it’s entire his own personal fault and what he should do is shut up and give his money to people who have it worse than he does.
it’s simple. the left offers young men nothing other than shame and harassment. so why would they want to deal with that? the right at least gives them a goal to strive for and actually acknowledges their problems aren’t their fault.
they are checking out of society because society offers them no reward anymore.
there is no point in be a part of it when you can’t own a home, can’t find a wife, and can’t have kids. all of that has been priced out of the market for any guy who isn’t in the top 10% of income/wealth. average men has no chance at any of that anymore. and they see that and they are attracted to the right because the right says ‘you can and should have those things’ the left says ‘you don’t deserve them’.
How come every fucking time. Every. Fucking. Time. Every time y’all talk about “men’s issues” you talk about “how difficult it is to find a wife”
Get. Your. Own. Shit. Together. First. Then you “find a wife”
And what does “finding a wife” have to do with money? How are you “priced out of” finding a wife? “Cause all women are golddiggers” or what?
And never fucking ever has the left said “you don’t deserve to start a family”
You know what, my dude? Vote MAGA. You deserve it
I think you’re hitting some good points, but the thing we need to teach these boys is that they shouldn’t be looking towards society for rewards. Society’s rewards have become a gamified rat race, so the way out is men to look inward. Not gonna lie though, that’s easier said than done…
I recently wrote a post too that touches on this topic: https://philosophyofbalance.com/blog/the-emancipation-of-men/
right, let me sit around on my ass and look inwards, while my costs go up faster than my salary.
surely that will fix things.
the fact you think men need to look inwards tells me you come from a position of massive privledge and wealth. those of us who have had to struggle to pay bills, and feared being homeless don’t care about ‘looking inward’ we care about not being broke.
most young men can’t afford their bills dude. no amount of inward emotional work is going to fix that. and they are being told to fuck off for even daring to ask that maybe if they work hard the yshould be able to afford the basics of a life. a home, a family, healthcare, security and community.
and all those things are actively being denied to them by the world. college grad can’t even afford to live with roommates anymore because rents are so high and wages are so low. how is a 24 year old guy ilving at home making 35K a year supposed to feel? while the left endlessly shits on him what a loser he is for not makign 250K a year.
Naaaaah
That’s what’s actually on their mind.
The entire right-wing propaganda goes as: “if you work hard and make smart choices, you’ll become rich too and will be able to exploit others for your benefit”. The rest are seen as passive doomer mob that just aren’t dedicated enough, and so end up subjugated by the alphas who pushed hard to pursue their dream (to dominate others and live a rich life on their backs).
This kind of propaganda works beautifully well on young folks who didn’t yet get to experience just how hard and unlikely it is to build a successful business or high-payed career, especially without compromising on one’s principles.
Pushing fake alpha male bullshit is my guess. See tate and the likes.
I spent over a decade thinking “God this sucks, but at least things will get better once the boomers die off.” The worst political blow of my life was realizing that the younger generation also lacked critical thinking skills.
Millennials are apparently the first generation to move “left” as they grow older, instead of right.
There are changes. Some positive.
Presumably meaning the percentage. Not all GenX went right, but I will admit I’ve been disappointed in seeing how many around my age did lose any semblance of critical thinking. And some of them very early, so it may not be age at all that’s a factor, but something else that affects people. Maybe millennials have managed to avoid whatever that is.
As a 50 year white guy old who has never voted for a conservative, and always tries to support the most progressive candidate, let me assure you, we exist, and we are tremendously disappointed in our demographic peers.
I think there is something to the “millennial’s refuse to grow up” mantra that boomers and genx accuse us of.
Like, if growing up is adopting a “fuck you i got mine” mentality… nah.
Tiktok and the like. Millenials grew up at the perfect time, where the internet was at its peak, then it all became consolidated into large echochambers which are more easily manipulated. Generations after millenials don’t remember the internet outside of tiktok, instagram, snapchat etc. they don’t what they missed out on.
That article was about Australia and even then the headline didn’t support the claims. Millennials have always been like 14 points more liberal than Gen X before them, but they haven’t moved more liberal over time.
elder milennials(too much baggage from thier boomer or Xer family members) turned right more than left, the younger ones tend to be left wings, barring some poc, and lgbtq+ are already on the left.
people move to the right when they buy homes and have kids. elder millenials are already there. younger ones haven’t started yet.
all of my friends who have bought a home and had kids have been way more conservative. both political and personally, they want to conserve things and not change things and see development/progress as a threat to themselves, their family, and their finances.
This is the story.
It’s also survivorship bias. Wealthy people live longer, and wealthy people are more conservative. As a cohort ages, the poor liberals die off and the wealthy assholes remain.
It’s also being annoyed and fed up with people harassing the shit out of you for being ‘rich and privileged’ when you live a pretty basic life. I paid for my own undergrad and graduate educations, lived cheap and saved up for 15 years, and finally got a house and some stability in my life.
I can’t tell you how many ‘leftists’ love ot mouth off at me now that I’m some rich privledged asshole. to them i might as well be a billionaire because if i ‘really cared about other people’ i’d let homeless drug addicts live in my spare bedroom or sell my home and give all the money to some women’s shelter. I haven’t taken a vacation in 3 years, meanwhile they are living off mom and dad and trust funds and traveling abroad 3x a year and screaming about how ‘underprivledged’ they are and how anyone who has a nominally better life than them is bad/wrong and they are some heroic struggling figure because they are ‘above’ traditional employment that might actually give them a better income.
It’s the hypocracy and the irony that I can’t stand anymore. When I grew up the left was more about equality and bringing people up, now it’s about tearing everyone else down to boost whomever is the most ‘oppressed’ at the moment.
ironically when leftists focus on economics, and not identity politics social justice bullshit… they get tons of support and votes from men of all ages.
Statements like these require the burden of proof. Voting habits show otherwise.
The Boomers designed (and then aggressively defunded) the education system that these kids are being raised in, so it’s not really a huge surprise that they aren’t learning critical thinking.
Then combine that with the social media/advertising landscape that they’re constantly exposed to, and it’s really a losing battle.
One reason why so many are turning bigots, you expressed it yourself: your refusal to consider them on your same level, as intelligent and critical thinkers as you. Somehow everyone is stupid but you (and I don’t mean “you” specifically, rather everyone who approaches discourse in the same way).
Yep.
I have a graduate degree, been left/progressive my entire life. Only in the past few years have I been told, to my face, that I’m a bigoted ignorance stupid piece of shit. It’s almost as if the left has gone off the rails and basically thinks anyone who won’t vote for them should f off. And they wonder why they don’t get votes or population.
I used to be proud to be a Democrat. Ever since Clinton I’ve been ashamed and all the party has done is double down on their stupid sexist bullshit.
I remember talking about how clinton was a bad candidate and was going to lose in 2016. all i ever got in reply was ‘you’re a sexist piece of shit’. yeah, god forbid i be critical of clinton’s shity campaign, and her crappy policies that alienated huge swaths of america.
Calling our opponents dumb is being polite, or maybe a psychological defense mechanism against the horror of the alternative.
If you are dumb it’s not your fault. You didn’t, know better. If you are ignorant you can learn.
If you are smart and you still made the choices knowing the outcomes, then we have to go to other explanations: greed is the next least bad, and certainly it plays a part, but honestly that doesn’t usually follow. The vast majority of conservative supporters have no chance to benefit from their policies, so we have to go further to find an explanation.
Cruelty. They want the suffering, the death, the destruction of human potential. Or maybe sadism. They enjoy inflicting pain and deprivation.
The mind recoils, so we call them dumb, because the world in which the ignorant masses are being misled by nafarious elites is less soul crushing to contemplate than the world where the masses act out of cruelty and sadism.
This bias is real. Everyone thinks they’re the smart one. There also do exist huge differences in intelligence.
Social media is an incredibly strong tool. It started off pretty nice, so we thought once the boomers died out we would be better off and for a while it was looking good, but it has quickly turned into algorithmic slop which can easily feed people propaganda without them even realising it.
You compare ideal left versus bad consequences of right. They do the reverse. Both of you feel good about your choices.
Both of you don’t see that it is divide and conquer and that the positions of the parties would shift if people started voting differently to allow the elite to choose their politicians.
To overcome this, you can learn to see the strong arguments of the right and the shortcomings of the left.
because the left actively hates young men.
imagine yourself being a 19 year old kid:
one side is saying how shit you are and how you deserve nothing. it’s only women who are worthwhile and you should just fuck off and die.
the other side is saying ‘do this and you’ll be successful’, it sucks right now but you will get there if you try.
which one are you going to find more appealing? pretty sure you’re not going to want to hang out with people who tell you how shitty and awful you are, but the people who tell you that you have a shot at a good life.
Except this is a right-wing talking point and a misrepresentation of what left-wing ideals encompass.
Except that’s not what they communicate, because while they offer “solutions” (mostly towards a rather suppressive and overly strict understanding of gender stereotypes) they immediately find in and shift the blame for young men’s problems towards an out-group, such as the “radical left” and LTBGQ people.
In fact, I find it’s the right that actively hates me for just being me because I don’t conform to their idea of what a man is, even though I’m a cis-hetero white male.
“Don’t try to find your own way because this is what you need to be, and everything else is degenerate and shameful.”
I know which I find more appealing.
dude i am a man. i have been a leftist man my entire life. i don’t wnat to be a part of the left anymore because it’s so pathetic and shameful to be a liberal these days. the left wants me to support them, give them my votes and money… but their political agenda does absolutely nothing to benefit me or men in general. we are told that because of historical oppression we ‘owe’ giving our work/money/time to minorities and women, that we should just endless sacrifice… that’s not how any of this works. and men are not interested in being used and abused and told me to be grateful for it.
what you fail to get is that it is a talking point… a talking point that is absolutely true. one that the left adamantly denies, but is true of the lived experience of tons of men and men are going to listen to who talks to their truth and their experience. not the left which adamantly denies we have any inherent value or worth… to the left our only worth is what we give to women and minorities.
dude the left hates me way more than the right does. that’s been my experinece. i went to college only to get harassed, assaulted and screamed at. people on the right don’t scream at me and tell me how i am a threat for minding my own business at a bar/cafe because my penis is a ‘threat’ to them. i’m glad you have enough white guilt to be shamed into submission, but i don’t. i worked my ass my entire life from the age of 14 and i am sick of being shamed and harassed for simply providing for myself. of being told that i’m an asshole for not giving more money to women and minorities when I was broke as shit and eating expired food. maybe you never had to provide for yourself because you had a well-off family to pay your bills, but a lot of us didn’t.
when i was in college i had rich women and minorities screaming at me how i shouldn’t exist becausei ‘stole’ their opportunity by getting a scholarship and their parents had to pay full tuition. Fuck the left, fuck their anti-penis obsession. men have every right to health and happiness as women do. and until their messaging and political goals become more inclusive, they are going to continue to alienate younger men.
people vote for their own self interest. they don’t vote for the interests of oppressed minority groups.
You’re making the assumption that these kids had a proper education that taught them critical thinking skills and how to spot propaganda.
I’m curious what would be the bar for proper education. Yesterday I was lectured by my fucking dentist (8years of college) on how poor people are all abusing the system and should lose all social protections. And he’s absolutely not an isolated case. Most of the engineers I manage are exhibiting similar thoughts about the jobless or immigrants. Again, at least 5 years of college. This shit is a poison. This is being relayed more and more by persons from 26 to 40 and I guess above all around. It feels like a national sport ; always shit on the one perceived below.
If my dentist ever said stuff like that to me I would tell them to shut the fuck up, and just do your job taking care of my teeth. If you don’t I’ll go to another dentist.
Pretty brave, telling someone who has already admitted they are a sadist to shut the fuck up, right before they get all in your mouth with metal tools!
Ah good point lol!
Just because you do a lot of it doesn’t mean it was a proper education. In the US education is all about making you ready to be useful to “The Economy”, not to train you to be more intelligent.
Belgium here but I guess it’s fair enough.
Did you change dentists
Yeah, even if someone participates in what would be considered proper education, it doesn’t guarantee they learn from it. No one is safe from propaganda, and we’re living in the worst propaganda era so far. Who do you even believe nowadays if you are incapable of thinking for yourself? And if you can think for yourself, how much can you trust yourself to not fall for fake or misleading information?
Yeah sure but then it’s not so much about « getting a proper education » anymore. Or the education system is failing us which is even worse because then what’s the way out? How can I / we steer this situation so that people suck less? Man I’m terrified my kids will end up like that.
MANY people are just dumb. They will react and fear the way their favorite newsperson wants.
The death of the American dream is a big one. Speaking very generally, men want a better future for themselves and are willing to follow whoever promises it, while women are being specifically targeted by conservatives an don’t want anything to do with that shit. The weakness of the American left means that the average person only sees establishment centrism and far-right fascism as options.
Money. And acceptance. If you are loudly left wing you don’t get trust from those with the money. All the money is dedicated right wingers.
I will get down voted for this. But if you want an answer, here’s what I believe happens:
Initially young men were mostly okay with social left, because: “let gay people be gay”, “don’t treat women worse than men”, “don’t be hateful to foreigners” are easy to agree to, they follow the principles of “let people do whatever they want if it doesn’t affect you”, “every human should be treated equally” and “don’t hate entire groups of people for attributes they can’t control, some individuals are good and some are bad in every group”.
However, social left has moved the goalpost. Now it is: “we have to change the rules for the trans”, “we have to give women privilege to compensate for misogyny”, “we have to give minorities privilege to compensate for X-ism” which follow different principles than the first paragraph. And with the moving of the goalpost comes “if you are to the right of the goalpost after being moved, you are a fascist and a Nazi and I don’t wanna hear what you have to say”.
I liked and agreed with the first paragraph a lot. But I don’t like the second one at all. And I believe this happens to a lot more young men.
That being said, I’m not retarded, I would never fote for a right wing party, specially since they are doing the same and moving the goalpost to the right so much that most of them are actually fascists.
You are spot on. This is my personal beef with the left. Young men hate authoritarian bullshit, even if it’s leftist.
Also the same myself. I am now a Nazi because I believe in equality, not inequality based on sex/race/gender. I’ve also personally experience environments where a woman/trans person can assault another person and gets off scot free because they are treated like toddlers, but if a hetero or male person did that, they’d get the cops called on them.
Young men are well aware the world has stacked the rules against them and they are going to support/listen to people who tell them how unfair and fucked up that is.
But the deck is far more stacked against the working class than it is men or women. They need to understand that they are workers first and everything else, gender, race, sexuality, etc, comes after.
I don’t have a clue how to get there though.
I’ve been in the leftmost spaces most of my adult life. Accommodations for nuance have generally cost me a few calories in processing thought and not misgendering people but tha’ts it. It was annoying at times to learn new things but the impact on my ability to experience and navigate the world was nil. The benefits were that i got to have deeper connections with my friends of various genders and ethnicities.
I think if someone’s coming from an unchallenged experience of masculinity that when people ask for accommodation they feel it as a personal attack because they never had to expend a single calorie of energy on it before, and now someone is asking them to.
It also just takes a looooong time (decades even) to get over one’s own insecurities because it’s easy to hide those behind a mask of masculinity. That part takes a lot more effort whereas the manosphere tells you that you don’t have to climb that mountain because actualization is achieved hiding behind that mask.
This is it.
Equality feels like oppression when you’re privileged.
Couldn’t be me talking from personal experience 🫠
Me too. leftist spaces used to be about freedom for everyone. Now they are about screaming at everyone who doesn’t agree with whatever the most ‘progressive’ point of view is that they are horrible and awful people.
Like, it’s fine if you wanna be a transgender poly person, but it’s not fine if you want to shit on everyone else who isn’t and act like they are ignorant nazis and spend your days shitting on anyone who isn’t in total agreement with your lifestyle.
Yeah it’s definitely not a monolith. There were always those cis-hating types of spaces around and that’s just counterproductive. Luckily my experience is in the “let’s figure it or together” types of spaces which are far and away the majority. But everyone remembers the most irritating voice which is often also the loudest.
I think there’s also a phase a lot of people go through in their journey where they feel a need to over-express their new identity. That can lead to social growing pains.
Yeah, keep antagonizing everyone that doesn’t have the exact same opinions you do. It’s gonna end great.
Also, that’s a lot of assumptions you made there.
I meant the Royal “you”. Fixing.
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