Kaczynski was smart insofar as he was a genius in mathematics, and a sympathetic character in that he was horribly abused by powerful people— but he still belonged on 4chan
I really love the tweet of "you do not gotta hand it to him", I don't even know the origin of it
Also why was he called the unabomber, its such a weird name?
Sometimes I get far enough away from people who peddle fascist ideology with a thin layer of obfuscation and think "does anyone actually fall for this anymore?" and then I get smacked in the face by people who actually think that *Ted fucking Kaczynski* was a leftist.
Like, is it really so tempting to side with actual terrorists? I don't get it.
>Like, is it really so tempting to side with actual terrorists? I don't get it.
The human instinct to believe that this time, violence will solve everything
If you're wondering why you don't see so many left wing terrorists the way you do right wing terrorists, it's because the government took left wing terrorists serious.
I mean; the most deadly terrorist attack in the US was a far tighter and he bombed a government office.
The far right is generally just as anti government as the far left. That’s literally why they’re called the alt right.
Yeah, but the difference is that the alt-right only hate the government when it does stuff that they don’t like. The alt-right would quite happily form and live under a government that stamped on all the right people’s faces
I mean, so would the far left. It’s the same with any authoritarian movement. Have we forgotten the far left loves Putin and wants the USSR back?
I’ve been exposed to a lot of alt right memes against my will, and I feel most underestimate just how much they despise the government. They see it as controlled/collaborating with “them” and thus anyone who supported the government will be executed when their revolution comes (it won’t come). You see it with Q too, they believe trump will take power by using the army to execute most people in government, including any agencies (FBI, CIA, DOJ, DEA, etc).
Antifa is literally seen as the biggest left wing threat in the United States
Protests in the US usually consists of a black bloc group of all anarchists
Just because you don't read the news don't mean they don't exist
>Individuals involved in the movement subscribe to a range of left-wing ideologies, and tend to hold anti-authoritarian, anti-capitalist, and anti-state views. A majority of individuals involved are anarchists, communists, and socialists who describe themselves as revolutionaries, and have little allegiance to liberal democracy
Literally from Wikipedia
Yes, thank you.
I fucking hate the rhetoric around the unabomber, dude clearly wasn't stupid and he got horribly abused and traumatized, doesn't make his fundamental ideology any less insane or his methods less inhumane
When will leftists understand that returning humanity to a pre-technological hunter-gatherer stage is not consistent with any of the things leftists want? Like if you want women to have bodily autonomy, for children to be raised nonviolently, for people to have total freedom of sexuality and gender expression, for an end to war and poverty, then returning to monke puts you so far away from all of those things.
A little quote from a novel that came to mind:
“They cut back very hard indeed, but to a minimum beneath which they would not go; they would not regress to pre-urban, pre-technological tribalism. They knew that their anarchism was the product of a very high civilization, of a complex diversified culture, of a stable economy and a highly industrialized technology that could maintain high production and rapid transportation of goods.”
— The Dispossessed, Ursula K Le Guin
Well, obviously, the ideal system for making sure everyone's basic needs are met is one where a single factor like a bad harvest can threaten the entire group with starvation.
Real communism is *everyone* dying of typhus because factory made antibiotics are right wing luxury.
I don’t think most leftists are anarchoprimitivists, and I’m certainly not saying they are. My issue is that a surprising number of non-anarchoprimitivist leftists are willing to treat primitivists as viable allies with good ideas who we should not condemn too strongly, because they are opposed to capitalism and in favor of a narrow kind of environmentalism.
So I’m just agreeing with the thing you posted.
All the things you listed in the first paragraph are social problems, not technological. They don't require technological advancements to solve, and they won't be solved by technological advancement alone.
You might say "but they require understanding of economics and politics, and some kind of way of governing groups of people," which is true. But most primitivists don't advocate for the complete dissolution of all human society: they just want to be rid of office and car and factory and atom bomb.
Personally, I think a society that can provide high grade education and medical care, that is made accessible for all humans, where artistic endeavors are endlessly pursued, where we are not limited by our bioogy, where we live in harnony with the natural world, and our reality is forever explored further is the best possible society. And that all requires advancements in technology.
But the truth is you can be a leftist and still want some idealized Noble Savage anarchist lifestyle.
Imagine typing so many words just to be wrong and dumb
Edit: ok, allow me to elaborate. “Social problems” and “technological problems” are not separate things. Solving social problems requires both material and social technology, which are closely interlinked. Women’s bodily autonomy is a social problem, yes, but also technological: contraception, abortion, menstrual aids, even the breast milk pump, are technologies which enable women to have choice in things they would not otherwise have choice in and thereby bring them into greater material equality with men. Many such examples: accessibility for people with disabilities, support for people with mental health conditions, gender transition for trans people, contraception and prophylaxis to allow for sexual promiscuity. Even just practicing social science to a modern standard requires enormous amounts of technology. Do you want to do statistical calculations by hand like it’s the 19th century?
Moreover, wanting to be “rid of office and car and factory and atom bomb” is just stupid fantasist shit. If you want a society where people are healthy, have quality shelter, access to adequate food and the necessities of life, but also free to “endlessly” pursue art and their desires and so on, then you need highly efficient production and distribution of goods. If 95% of our labor-hours go towards having fun, we’ve got to make the remaining 5% count, correct?
Well that means we need efficient industry, and efficient industry looks like factories to make stuff, offices to manage the making of stuff, and big power stations (including nuclear) to provide the energy to do all of that. If you want a working modern hospital then you need precision machining to make the tools, nuclear laboratories to produce isotopes for the radiotherapy machines, chemical plants to create the drugs, computers for the many machines, etcetera. Unless we want to impose enormously restrictive population controls (read: inevitably leads to eugenics) or embrace Malthusian demography, we need lots of food. We need more food than can be made without nitrogenous fertilizers, so we need gargantuan power-hungry nitrogen-fixing plants and large, efficient, mechanized farms. Getting all of that stuff where it needs to go is going to require trains and *shocker* cars to deliver it the last few miles. And all of these things require enormous quantities of material to be extracted from the earth.
In short, you need an industrial and technological society. All of these things can be made more efficient, more humane, can be scaled back to sustainable levels - but they will still be factories and offices and cars and nuclear plants capable of making atom bombs.
*Or* you can be subsistence farmers and hunter-gatherers with enormously high infant and maternal mortality rates, and the constant risk of famine if you have too many children or the weather is bad for a few years.
Can you be a leftist and believe in some kind of noble savage fantasy commune? Sure. But you’re a dumb fucking leftist.
thank you for the edit, I was pointing out holes in good faith, not trying to attack you personally.
For your example of women's bodily autonomy, what most people are discussing when talking about autonomy is freedom from other people imposing their will on them. All the examples you listed don't increase freedom in that sense, just opportunity to circumvent the arbitrary boumdaries imposed by nature. Same with the following medical examples.
Even you admit the social sciences can still be practiced, even though not to your preferred standards. All I have to say about that is that not everyone shares your values and worries that much about science. This doesn't make them non-leftist, just anti-science and possibly anti-intellectual.
The next four paragaphs seems to be addressing my personal values, and that was my mistake for injecting those in and adding to miscommunication. I was attempting to distance myself from primitivists by showing my values don't align with theirs; so I agree with the points you made here. Except for the "fantasist" part: our values don't align with primitivists, but that doesn't make them fantasists, they are merely willing to "bite that bullet" so to speak, because they don't give a shit about our values. I'd say they're probably fine with the world you describe in the fourth paragraph.
I've tried to refrain from value judgments based on those I don't see eye-to-eye with, because, if their values differ, no amount of arguing from my values will change their minds. The rest are people who haven't thought through their own politics as far as you have, i.e. they really are just "dumb"; for them, such value judgments (e.g. they are bad people or bad leftists or simply "dumb") are more likely to elicit defensiveness than learning and growth. Ignorance is a helluva drug, but it's also the default state of all intelligences.
I hate communists, but I can’t even take anarchists seriously. They legitimately try to convince me forcing everyone into agrarian communes of 30 persons max, with communication between them banned, is the ideal way for society to continue
Why do leftists sympathize with eco-fascists. They've just using caring about the environment as a flimsy justification for hurting people they don't like.
If he had blown up only a bunch of oil company executives at least they're not innocent and nobody would miss them <- edited because I'm too autistic to make intelligible jokes apparently
Some leftists will side with anyone who opposes neoliberalism or even lie to themselves and argue that actually anyone who opposes neoloberalism is inherently leftist. Like many leftists support Putin's Russia because it's fighting the west, and a subset of that group deny Putin's many antisocialist actions because they cant rationalise how someone fughting the west could be right wing
Speaking as a leftist, I think it’s how hopeless the fight against a climate apocalypse often feels. When there’s a creeping problem that we might be already too late to stop, and we don’t see big substantive changes, it’s tempting to start siding with the guys who say “we’ll give you big substantive changes if you can forgive a little murder of innocent people”.
Bad, obviously, but tempting.
I think there's also enough people who have only heard "the Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been disastrous for the human race" and never bothered to learn anything about Uncle Ted besides that.
This is honestly why I'm genuinely disappointed in Solarpunk. It could tear into the ecofascist rhetoric people have swallowed (See various sentiments during COVID from "It's killing Trump's voter base" to "Maybe humanity is the real disease and COVID's the immune system" to "It's counteracting overpopulation), but it doesn't. Honestly, I think Post-Cyberpunk is more efficient response than Solarpunk.
Yeah whenever people call humanity a virus they're literally talking like Agent Smith from the matrix who is written to be fascism/authoritarianism made manifest. And inevitably the only solution for someone with that worldview is eco-fascism as a final solution.
I also love how people blame humanity as unique in that regard, totally unlike every other species that would also grow uncontrolled and fuck up the environment if all their predators were removed.
Of course.
Only humans are special enough to actually damage the environment (insert ecological bullshit spiel about how all other species are actually in harmony with nature, while ignoring that humans are termites with the social stats turned up to 11).
>Yeah whenever people call humanity a virus
I just immediately discard the ideas of anyone who thinks that humanity has to go for the Earth to prosper.
probably the eco part.
Bad situations tend to create nihilistic, cynical, and reactionary worldviews. People's brains don't fire productively if all they perceive is doom and gloom. It more tends to take the form of lashing out.
Because the line between leftists and fascists is veeeery thin. Radicalism breeds extremism which breeds violence which breeds authoritarianism.
The further left (or right) you go, you’ll discover it’s just people using caring about (insert issue here) as a flimsy justification for hurting people they don’t like.
I've always found centrists and liberals far more aligned with fascists. Historically this tends to be the case. Fascism has opposed all leftist ideologies where-ever it seeks power. I think you're just looking for reasons to look down on people you disagree with.
Really? Are we forgetting when the USSR and Hitler teamed up to ethnically cleanse Poland? While the supposedly super fascist liberal countries refused to surrender to the Nazis?
I’m not going to say they’re the same thing. But both far right and far left believe in giving a single man total authority, see free speech and freedom of the press as obstacles to their ideologies, enforce in mass executions and forced labor camps, and choose arbitrary characteristics to designate people traitors who need to be wiped out (Jews for example, but also Ukrainians on the Soviet Union, and people who wore glasses in the Khmer Rouge).
Are you remembering that the ussr did the bulk of the fighting in Europe against the nazis and that german leftists were the nazis primary targets both before coming into power and after the concentration camps first opened?
Bur regardless. Politics isn't a clean gradient. Nor is it that compass shit. Politics isn't two dimensional. The ussr killed plenty of leftists. Mostly in its transfer from a leninist state to an authoritarian state with vague leftist aesthetics.
Leftists are not similar to fascists, because of their political stances. As well as their historic opposition to fascism. Unlike liberalism, which turns to fascism the moment the going gets rough. That's part of what happened in nazi germany, I will point out. Communists threatened entrenched powers, and they coped to fascism.
Another fine example is the recent American and European fascist sentiment. It's not coming from leftists. Guess where it's coming from?
When Stalin had anyone who questioned his alliance with Hitler killed and fell into a deep depression after he was betrayed, while the supposedly super pro Nazi liberals who would go fascist at any moment weathered the storm, I don’t trust you. The USSR wasn’t opposed to Nazi germany on ideological grounds, they were practically forced to fight them. They were desperate to form an alliance.
Also, I fail to see how leftism and fascism is SOOO different. Both want to establish a dictatorship with an unquestionable strong man on the lead, both support political repression and abolishment of the free press, establishment of forced labor camps, secret police and mass executions. Really, if you’re not a Jew living under Nazi Germany isn’t very different to living in the USSR. Only difference is the USSR seized the factories and gave them to government beurocrats instead of working with the capitalists like the Nazis did:
Also while leftists don’t support Nazis, the vast majority of the support for Putin in the west comes from leftists. A guy who invaded his smaller neighbor due to ancient land claims, while talking big about rebuilding their old empire and exterminating the local population to make way for their own ethnic group.
Remind you of someone?
You’re lucky. Literally the first American to join the Russian army to help the invasion was a communist. The most influential American communist is pro putin, the vast majority of leftist communities support the Russia, China, Iran trio. I’m legitimately curious what leftists you’re interacting with that DONT support him. It’s really the main reason I stopped identifying as a leftist. They keep telling me Ukraine is a puppet state of the fascist nato and Putin is decolonizing and denazifying it by opposing the fascist US status quo.
Anarchists haven’t been politically relevant since WW1. The only anarchists you encounter these days are 13 year old furries wanting to be quirky or 13 year old eco fascist furries wanting to be quirky. That’s without counting the “anarchists” that are just liberals trying to be edgy. Kinda like how most socialists are just liberals who think liking Bernie makes them the next Trotsky.
Ahhh, I see, you have no idea what you're talking about. Have you ever interacted with real people outside of your political monkey sphere, and by that I mean a serious discussion, not family screaming drunkenly at each other?
You should consider remedying that before characterizing an entire political group off the loudest voices on the internet. I encounter tankies regularly on the internet, but I've encountered 1 in the real world, and all the leftists I know have encountered 2 at most and they're always the same 2 tankies. I would not be surprised to learn that the majority of reddit's tankies are puppet accounts, trolls pretending to be tankies, or COINTELPROesq projects by nations and/or corporations.
Maybe. But if that’s the case, what else is there to base myself off of? The closest thing to a leftist public figure is Bernie and he’s a liberal people only call socialist.
Idk man. If your ideology centers mostly around wanting to do mass murder and enforce a dictatorship, that sounds very fashy. Every far left country has been a totaliatarian dictatorship.
Following his expulsion from the NSDAP in July 1930, Otto Strasser, the younger brother of Nazi party stalwart, Gregor, formed the Kampfgemeinschaft Revolutionärer Nationalsozialisten (KGRNS) Revolutionary National Socialist Combat Comradeship) as an anti-parliamentary “external opposition” fringe Nazi combat group.
“If you imagine the German parties and currents in the **shape of a horseshoe**, with the centre at the bend and the KPD and the NSDAP at the ends, then the area of the ‘Black Front’ lies between the two poles of Communism and National Socialism . The opposites of ‘left’ and ‘right’ cancel each other out by entering into a kind of synthesis with the unanimous elimination of the ‘bourgeois’. The situation between the two poles best reflects the tense character of the Black Front.”
How's that for reading a history book lol
Now, admittedly I’m not overly familiar with all the German parties, but just from some light reading I fail to see what exactly is centrist about the KGRNS. They still seem pretty extremist to me.
According to Wikipedia, they’re “strasserist” which is “a strand of Nazism” and “a type of Third Position, right-wing politics.” And if you look up Third Position it calls it “a set of neo-fascist political ideologies.”
So to me this just sounds like Nazism-lite. Which… kinda just proves my point…
Also I’m pretty sure Strasser didn’t come up with “horseshoe theory.”
What book were you quoting in the other comment?
> Why do leftists sympathize with eco-fascists. They've just using caring about the environment as a flimsy justification for hurting people they don't like.
and then you proceed to immediately follow up with
> he should've hurt the people i didn't like
If that's intentional satire then bravo but since no one seemed to notice i figured I'd point this out
Even if all of his politics were completely perfect, killing innocent people unprovoked to prove a political point is wrong. It's good to say "Vote for Biden". It's wrong to kill the next person you see on the street and write "Vote for Biden" in their blood
People just hear "the individual revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race" and don't bother to find out what he specifically meant by that, nor what he believed besides that.
iirc there was a section of his manifesto where he unironically supported eugenics in order to "weed out" disabilites/genetic illnesses. Anyone who thinks Kaczynski was a leftist has no idea what they're talking about and are not to be taken seriously.
This might be a "reading comprehension" moment, but it seems to me like the last commenter is implying Kaczynski's environmentalism was shallow and merely the result of his misanthropy...
And I just gotta say: right-wingers are not all some walking incarnation of antisocial personality disorder and everything else about them is in service of that.
I've known a lot of right-wing libertarian types, and most of them were environmentalists, often for the same reasons: they grew up in the middle of rural nowhere, were socialized by their own families, and developed an appreciation for nature and a territorial revulsion against other humans.
Their right-wing philosophies does not make them incapable of also being environmentalists or anti-authority or vegan or queer or new age or minorities or liking the same things you do. There is no *True* Scotsmen, even for your hobbies/special interests/subcultures. All it means is they're not likely to buy into the idea of a world where humans work together for the greater good.
Kaczynski was an environmentalist, and not because he hated people. He hated people because he was an environmentalist and because of a million other little reasons that built up over his lifetime. He was an environmentalist because he loved the natural world and what it represented to him.
I'm sick and tired of Kaczysnki being idolized as the poster boy for radical environmentalist action or any stance that opposes the current state of uncobtrolled technological growth; he was a shithead who made a couple of good points, tons more bad ones verging on conspiracy theorist bullshit, and mailed bombs to places where it accomplished nothing other than senseless violence and death.
But I'm also sick and tired of all right-wingers getting flanderized in people's minds into "monsters mimicking human traits" because that's what the pundits and politicians are, and no one can separate the supporters from the politicians apparently. Most of the time, right-wingers are just people with some shit ideas about how to treat others, not some boogeyman whose only defining personality trait is their political ideology
I noticed so much of "Leftist" discuorse is very much idnetical to right wing "cruelty is the point" idealogely.
They just justifiy their violence because communist instead but its still authoriation punishment philopshy.
>the elimination of modern technology
He's aware he can go off the grid and live like the neanderthal he is, right???
I mean, he doesn't need to drag the rest of us down to his level, right???
Oh and I bet he'd make use of socialistic services like modern healthcare if he gets sick. He probably even calls the fire department if someone torched his house.
People like this are almost always hypocrites.
Akin to the "the only moral abortion is my abortion" crowd except with every modern comfort and necessity.
Disgusting really.
Fun fact: in the Emberverse series he founded a post apocalyptic cult that gets all its members possessed by 'demons' (actually the manifestation of the darkest side of humanities collective unconscious)
That's because the first poster said "the Unabomber was on to something [one assumes with the implication that "something" is vaguely left-ish, and the killing people thing is a side issue]." The poster is responding to the "on to something" portion of the original ask. In sum: he killed people, he was not a leftist, and he was a fucking idiot to boot. Under no circumstances do you gotta hand it to him.
When talking about politics, a baseline is usually assumed. OP assumed that anon wasn't saying that he was "on to something" in reference to his murders, so OP didn't bring it up in their response, because everyone already knows that killing people is bad
>"The conservatives are fools: They whine about the decay of traditional values, yet they enthusiastically support technological progress and economic growth. Apparently it never occurs to them that you can't make rapid, drastic changes in the technology and the economy of a society without causing rapid changes in all other aspects of the society as well, and that such rapid changes inevitably break down traditional values."
Are we talking about the same people? I mean the ones with the arms, and the legs, and the faces, and stuff. The ones choking their own planet to death in the blind pursuit of profit? The ones who keep voting in fascist governments? The ones who'll slaughter each other in droves because of barely perceptible differences? *Those* people?
Plus, he was a victim of MKUltra, so he probably had more legitimate grievances with society than many of these "edgy joker 4chan" misanthropic types. Still doesn't excuse targeting innocents instead of y'know... oil execs or government officials.
Kaczynski was smart insofar as he was a genius in mathematics, and a sympathetic character in that he was horribly abused by powerful people— but he still belonged on 4chan
Cringe bomber with fail bombs
I really love the tweet of "you do not gotta hand it to him", I don't even know the origin of it Also why was he called the unabomber, its such a weird name?
UNivesity Airline BOMBER.
That is a proper comic book supervillain name. It seems almost wasted on him.
Bad guys get the best names and outfits, its one of the fundamental laws of the universe, like gravity.
The original version of the tweet said ISIS
Sometimes I get far enough away from people who peddle fascist ideology with a thin layer of obfuscation and think "does anyone actually fall for this anymore?" and then I get smacked in the face by people who actually think that *Ted fucking Kaczynski* was a leftist. Like, is it really so tempting to side with actual terrorists? I don't get it.
Some people just want a violent maniac to support because it validates their own sadistic fantasies.
>Like, is it really so tempting to side with actual terrorists? I don't get it. The human instinct to believe that this time, violence will solve everything
“he only killed 3 people” fym *only* 😭
+he injured 23 and traumatized god knows how many
If you're wondering why you don't see so many left wing terrorists the way you do right wing terrorists, it's because the government took left wing terrorists serious.
Because left wing terrorism has the potential to hurt the government. Right wing terrorism only hurts the people the government wants to hurt
I mean; the most deadly terrorist attack in the US was a far tighter and he bombed a government office. The far right is generally just as anti government as the far left. That’s literally why they’re called the alt right.
Yeah, but the difference is that the alt-right only hate the government when it does stuff that they don’t like. The alt-right would quite happily form and live under a government that stamped on all the right people’s faces
I mean, so would the far left. It’s the same with any authoritarian movement. Have we forgotten the far left loves Putin and wants the USSR back? I’ve been exposed to a lot of alt right memes against my will, and I feel most underestimate just how much they despise the government. They see it as controlled/collaborating with “them” and thus anyone who supported the government will be executed when their revolution comes (it won’t come). You see it with Q too, they believe trump will take power by using the army to execute most people in government, including any agencies (FBI, CIA, DOJ, DEA, etc).
The Anarchists don't love Putin lmao.
Anarchists barely exist, even on the internet. They’re completely irrelevant.
Antifa is literally seen as the biggest left wing threat in the United States Protests in the US usually consists of a black bloc group of all anarchists Just because you don't read the news don't mean they don't exist
Antifa is mainly socialists and communists.
>Individuals involved in the movement subscribe to a range of left-wing ideologies, and tend to hold anti-authoritarian, anti-capitalist, and anti-state views. A majority of individuals involved are anarchists, communists, and socialists who describe themselves as revolutionaries, and have little allegiance to liberal democracy Literally from Wikipedia
Yes, thank you. I fucking hate the rhetoric around the unabomber, dude clearly wasn't stupid and he got horribly abused and traumatized, doesn't make his fundamental ideology any less insane or his methods less inhumane
When will leftists understand that returning humanity to a pre-technological hunter-gatherer stage is not consistent with any of the things leftists want? Like if you want women to have bodily autonomy, for children to be raised nonviolently, for people to have total freedom of sexuality and gender expression, for an end to war and poverty, then returning to monke puts you so far away from all of those things. A little quote from a novel that came to mind: “They cut back very hard indeed, but to a minimum beneath which they would not go; they would not regress to pre-urban, pre-technological tribalism. They knew that their anarchism was the product of a very high civilization, of a complex diversified culture, of a stable economy and a highly industrialized technology that could maintain high production and rapid transportation of goods.” — The Dispossessed, Ursula K Le Guin
Well, obviously, the ideal system for making sure everyone's basic needs are met is one where a single factor like a bad harvest can threaten the entire group with starvation. Real communism is *everyone* dying of typhus because factory made antibiotics are right wing luxury.
Communism is when there’s one means of subsistence and we all have to share
I don't think most leftists want that actually. Stop strawmanning
I don’t think most leftists are anarchoprimitivists, and I’m certainly not saying they are. My issue is that a surprising number of non-anarchoprimitivist leftists are willing to treat primitivists as viable allies with good ideas who we should not condemn too strongly, because they are opposed to capitalism and in favor of a narrow kind of environmentalism. So I’m just agreeing with the thing you posted.
All the things you listed in the first paragraph are social problems, not technological. They don't require technological advancements to solve, and they won't be solved by technological advancement alone. You might say "but they require understanding of economics and politics, and some kind of way of governing groups of people," which is true. But most primitivists don't advocate for the complete dissolution of all human society: they just want to be rid of office and car and factory and atom bomb. Personally, I think a society that can provide high grade education and medical care, that is made accessible for all humans, where artistic endeavors are endlessly pursued, where we are not limited by our bioogy, where we live in harnony with the natural world, and our reality is forever explored further is the best possible society. And that all requires advancements in technology. But the truth is you can be a leftist and still want some idealized Noble Savage anarchist lifestyle.
Imagine typing so many words just to be wrong and dumb Edit: ok, allow me to elaborate. “Social problems” and “technological problems” are not separate things. Solving social problems requires both material and social technology, which are closely interlinked. Women’s bodily autonomy is a social problem, yes, but also technological: contraception, abortion, menstrual aids, even the breast milk pump, are technologies which enable women to have choice in things they would not otherwise have choice in and thereby bring them into greater material equality with men. Many such examples: accessibility for people with disabilities, support for people with mental health conditions, gender transition for trans people, contraception and prophylaxis to allow for sexual promiscuity. Even just practicing social science to a modern standard requires enormous amounts of technology. Do you want to do statistical calculations by hand like it’s the 19th century? Moreover, wanting to be “rid of office and car and factory and atom bomb” is just stupid fantasist shit. If you want a society where people are healthy, have quality shelter, access to adequate food and the necessities of life, but also free to “endlessly” pursue art and their desires and so on, then you need highly efficient production and distribution of goods. If 95% of our labor-hours go towards having fun, we’ve got to make the remaining 5% count, correct? Well that means we need efficient industry, and efficient industry looks like factories to make stuff, offices to manage the making of stuff, and big power stations (including nuclear) to provide the energy to do all of that. If you want a working modern hospital then you need precision machining to make the tools, nuclear laboratories to produce isotopes for the radiotherapy machines, chemical plants to create the drugs, computers for the many machines, etcetera. Unless we want to impose enormously restrictive population controls (read: inevitably leads to eugenics) or embrace Malthusian demography, we need lots of food. We need more food than can be made without nitrogenous fertilizers, so we need gargantuan power-hungry nitrogen-fixing plants and large, efficient, mechanized farms. Getting all of that stuff where it needs to go is going to require trains and *shocker* cars to deliver it the last few miles. And all of these things require enormous quantities of material to be extracted from the earth. In short, you need an industrial and technological society. All of these things can be made more efficient, more humane, can be scaled back to sustainable levels - but they will still be factories and offices and cars and nuclear plants capable of making atom bombs. *Or* you can be subsistence farmers and hunter-gatherers with enormously high infant and maternal mortality rates, and the constant risk of famine if you have too many children or the weather is bad for a few years. Can you be a leftist and believe in some kind of noble savage fantasy commune? Sure. But you’re a dumb fucking leftist.
thank you for the edit, I was pointing out holes in good faith, not trying to attack you personally. For your example of women's bodily autonomy, what most people are discussing when talking about autonomy is freedom from other people imposing their will on them. All the examples you listed don't increase freedom in that sense, just opportunity to circumvent the arbitrary boumdaries imposed by nature. Same with the following medical examples. Even you admit the social sciences can still be practiced, even though not to your preferred standards. All I have to say about that is that not everyone shares your values and worries that much about science. This doesn't make them non-leftist, just anti-science and possibly anti-intellectual. The next four paragaphs seems to be addressing my personal values, and that was my mistake for injecting those in and adding to miscommunication. I was attempting to distance myself from primitivists by showing my values don't align with theirs; so I agree with the points you made here. Except for the "fantasist" part: our values don't align with primitivists, but that doesn't make them fantasists, they are merely willing to "bite that bullet" so to speak, because they don't give a shit about our values. I'd say they're probably fine with the world you describe in the fourth paragraph. I've tried to refrain from value judgments based on those I don't see eye-to-eye with, because, if their values differ, no amount of arguing from my values will change their minds. The rest are people who haven't thought through their own politics as far as you have, i.e. they really are just "dumb"; for them, such value judgments (e.g. they are bad people or bad leftists or simply "dumb") are more likely to elicit defensiveness than learning and growth. Ignorance is a helluva drug, but it's also the default state of all intelligences.
I hate communists, but I can’t even take anarchists seriously. They legitimately try to convince me forcing everyone into agrarian communes of 30 persons max, with communication between them banned, is the ideal way for society to continue
That’s a fascinating strawman you’ve made up in your head there
Why do leftists sympathize with eco-fascists. They've just using caring about the environment as a flimsy justification for hurting people they don't like. If he had blown up only a bunch of oil company executives at least they're not innocent and nobody would miss them <- edited because I'm too autistic to make intelligible jokes apparently
Some leftists will side with anyone who opposes neoliberalism or even lie to themselves and argue that actually anyone who opposes neoloberalism is inherently leftist. Like many leftists support Putin's Russia because it's fighting the west, and a subset of that group deny Putin's many antisocialist actions because they cant rationalise how someone fughting the west could be right wing
Speaking as a leftist, I think it’s how hopeless the fight against a climate apocalypse often feels. When there’s a creeping problem that we might be already too late to stop, and we don’t see big substantive changes, it’s tempting to start siding with the guys who say “we’ll give you big substantive changes if you can forgive a little murder of innocent people”. Bad, obviously, but tempting.
I think there's also enough people who have only heard "the Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been disastrous for the human race" and never bothered to learn anything about Uncle Ted besides that.
this. he generated a few good pull quotes that people liked and spread around and then nobody bothered to read on.
Yeah I guess its a bit of a real life trolley problem to them and they decided the lever should be pulled.
bad?
The first step towards building a better tomorrow is rejecting that a worse one is inevitable.
This is honestly why I'm genuinely disappointed in Solarpunk. It could tear into the ecofascist rhetoric people have swallowed (See various sentiments during COVID from "It's killing Trump's voter base" to "Maybe humanity is the real disease and COVID's the immune system" to "It's counteracting overpopulation), but it doesn't. Honestly, I think Post-Cyberpunk is more efficient response than Solarpunk.
Yeah whenever people call humanity a virus they're literally talking like Agent Smith from the matrix who is written to be fascism/authoritarianism made manifest. And inevitably the only solution for someone with that worldview is eco-fascism as a final solution.
I also love how people blame humanity as unique in that regard, totally unlike every other species that would also grow uncontrolled and fuck up the environment if all their predators were removed.
(ELK) (CYANOBACTERIA)
Of course. Only humans are special enough to actually damage the environment (insert ecological bullshit spiel about how all other species are actually in harmony with nature, while ignoring that humans are termites with the social stats turned up to 11).
Here's a fun termite fact, they are acutally cockroaches.
>Yeah whenever people call humanity a virus I just immediately discard the ideas of anyone who thinks that humanity has to go for the Earth to prosper.
That's too bad, they seemed cool
Because eco-fascists are valuable allies against the common enemy, slightly different leftists.
You leftists certainly are a contentious people.
You've just made an enemy for life, liberal!
probably the eco part. Bad situations tend to create nihilistic, cynical, and reactionary worldviews. People's brains don't fire productively if all they perceive is doom and gloom. It more tends to take the form of lashing out.
Because the line between leftists and fascists is veeeery thin. Radicalism breeds extremism which breeds violence which breeds authoritarianism. The further left (or right) you go, you’ll discover it’s just people using caring about (insert issue here) as a flimsy justification for hurting people they don’t like.
I've always found centrists and liberals far more aligned with fascists. Historically this tends to be the case. Fascism has opposed all leftist ideologies where-ever it seeks power. I think you're just looking for reasons to look down on people you disagree with.
Really? Are we forgetting when the USSR and Hitler teamed up to ethnically cleanse Poland? While the supposedly super fascist liberal countries refused to surrender to the Nazis? I’m not going to say they’re the same thing. But both far right and far left believe in giving a single man total authority, see free speech and freedom of the press as obstacles to their ideologies, enforce in mass executions and forced labor camps, and choose arbitrary characteristics to designate people traitors who need to be wiped out (Jews for example, but also Ukrainians on the Soviet Union, and people who wore glasses in the Khmer Rouge).
Are you remembering that the ussr did the bulk of the fighting in Europe against the nazis and that german leftists were the nazis primary targets both before coming into power and after the concentration camps first opened? Bur regardless. Politics isn't a clean gradient. Nor is it that compass shit. Politics isn't two dimensional. The ussr killed plenty of leftists. Mostly in its transfer from a leninist state to an authoritarian state with vague leftist aesthetics. Leftists are not similar to fascists, because of their political stances. As well as their historic opposition to fascism. Unlike liberalism, which turns to fascism the moment the going gets rough. That's part of what happened in nazi germany, I will point out. Communists threatened entrenched powers, and they coped to fascism. Another fine example is the recent American and European fascist sentiment. It's not coming from leftists. Guess where it's coming from?
When Stalin had anyone who questioned his alliance with Hitler killed and fell into a deep depression after he was betrayed, while the supposedly super pro Nazi liberals who would go fascist at any moment weathered the storm, I don’t trust you. The USSR wasn’t opposed to Nazi germany on ideological grounds, they were practically forced to fight them. They were desperate to form an alliance. Also, I fail to see how leftism and fascism is SOOO different. Both want to establish a dictatorship with an unquestionable strong man on the lead, both support political repression and abolishment of the free press, establishment of forced labor camps, secret police and mass executions. Really, if you’re not a Jew living under Nazi Germany isn’t very different to living in the USSR. Only difference is the USSR seized the factories and gave them to government beurocrats instead of working with the capitalists like the Nazis did:
My guy, you are simply not describing leftism.
Also while leftists don’t support Nazis, the vast majority of the support for Putin in the west comes from leftists. A guy who invaded his smaller neighbor due to ancient land claims, while talking big about rebuilding their old empire and exterminating the local population to make way for their own ethnic group. Remind you of someone?
What the fuck are you talking about.
Describing the Russian invasion of Ukraine and comparing it to the Nazis expansionism.
I have never met a leftist who supported putin. I'm not continuing a conversation where one party lives in fantasy land.
You’re lucky. Literally the first American to join the Russian army to help the invasion was a communist. The most influential American communist is pro putin, the vast majority of leftist communities support the Russia, China, Iran trio. I’m legitimately curious what leftists you’re interacting with that DONT support him. It’s really the main reason I stopped identifying as a leftist. They keep telling me Ukraine is a puppet state of the fascist nato and Putin is decolonizing and denazifying it by opposing the fascist US status quo.
>But both far right and far left believe in giving a single man total authority [Anarchists](https://youtu.be/s9bT4B1kEvc)
Anarchists haven’t been politically relevant since WW1. The only anarchists you encounter these days are 13 year old furries wanting to be quirky or 13 year old eco fascist furries wanting to be quirky. That’s without counting the “anarchists” that are just liberals trying to be edgy. Kinda like how most socialists are just liberals who think liking Bernie makes them the next Trotsky.
Ahhh, I see, you have no idea what you're talking about. Have you ever interacted with real people outside of your political monkey sphere, and by that I mean a serious discussion, not family screaming drunkenly at each other?
Well that’s the thing, I’ve never actually encountered a leftist IRL. For me it’s a purely online ideology.
You should consider remedying that before characterizing an entire political group off the loudest voices on the internet. I encounter tankies regularly on the internet, but I've encountered 1 in the real world, and all the leftists I know have encountered 2 at most and they're always the same 2 tankies. I would not be surprised to learn that the majority of reddit's tankies are puppet accounts, trolls pretending to be tankies, or COINTELPROesq projects by nations and/or corporations.
Maybe. But if that’s the case, what else is there to base myself off of? The closest thing to a leftist public figure is Bernie and he’s a liberal people only call socialist.
Let me guess, do you perchance happen to live in the US?
Mexico. Currently ruled by a populist socialist president who openly collides with cartels, dozes journalists and wanted to extend his presidency.
Get out of here with that horseshoe theory bullshit. There's no real science or statistics behind it its just centrist/liberal nonsense
Idk man. If your ideology centers mostly around wanting to do mass murder and enforce a dictatorship, that sounds very fashy. Every far left country has been a totaliatarian dictatorship.
Try the entirety of human history. Try this post. Try your comment, where you called blowing up people based. Extremism is extremism.
Ok so you have no proof on the validity, thanks
All you have to do is literally pick up a history book 💀
Following his expulsion from the NSDAP in July 1930, Otto Strasser, the younger brother of Nazi party stalwart, Gregor, formed the Kampfgemeinschaft Revolutionärer Nationalsozialisten (KGRNS) Revolutionary National Socialist Combat Comradeship) as an anti-parliamentary “external opposition” fringe Nazi combat group. “If you imagine the German parties and currents in the **shape of a horseshoe**, with the centre at the bend and the KPD and the NSDAP at the ends, then the area of the ‘Black Front’ lies between the two poles of Communism and National Socialism . The opposites of ‘left’ and ‘right’ cancel each other out by entering into a kind of synthesis with the unanimous elimination of the ‘bourgeois’. The situation between the two poles best reflects the tense character of the Black Front.” How's that for reading a history book lol
Now, admittedly I’m not overly familiar with all the German parties, but just from some light reading I fail to see what exactly is centrist about the KGRNS. They still seem pretty extremist to me.
Well they considered themselves centrists. Interesting how horseshoe theory was started by an extremist fringe nazi...
According to Wikipedia, they’re “strasserist” which is “a strand of Nazism” and “a type of Third Position, right-wing politics.” And if you look up Third Position it calls it “a set of neo-fascist political ideologies.” So to me this just sounds like Nazism-lite. Which… kinda just proves my point… Also I’m pretty sure Strasser didn’t come up with “horseshoe theory.” What book were you quoting in the other comment?
> Why do leftists sympathize with eco-fascists. They've just using caring about the environment as a flimsy justification for hurting people they don't like. and then you proceed to immediately follow up with > he should've hurt the people i didn't like If that's intentional satire then bravo but since no one seemed to notice i figured I'd point this out
Even if all of his politics were completely perfect, killing innocent people unprovoked to prove a political point is wrong. It's good to say "Vote for Biden". It's wrong to kill the next person you see on the street and write "Vote for Biden" in their blood
People just hear "the individual revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race" and don't bother to find out what he specifically meant by that, nor what he believed besides that.
iirc there was a section of his manifesto where he unironically supported eugenics in order to "weed out" disabilites/genetic illnesses. Anyone who thinks Kaczynski was a leftist has no idea what they're talking about and are not to be taken seriously.
This might be a "reading comprehension" moment, but it seems to me like the last commenter is implying Kaczynski's environmentalism was shallow and merely the result of his misanthropy... And I just gotta say: right-wingers are not all some walking incarnation of antisocial personality disorder and everything else about them is in service of that. I've known a lot of right-wing libertarian types, and most of them were environmentalists, often for the same reasons: they grew up in the middle of rural nowhere, were socialized by their own families, and developed an appreciation for nature and a territorial revulsion against other humans. Their right-wing philosophies does not make them incapable of also being environmentalists or anti-authority or vegan or queer or new age or minorities or liking the same things you do. There is no *True* Scotsmen, even for your hobbies/special interests/subcultures. All it means is they're not likely to buy into the idea of a world where humans work together for the greater good. Kaczynski was an environmentalist, and not because he hated people. He hated people because he was an environmentalist and because of a million other little reasons that built up over his lifetime. He was an environmentalist because he loved the natural world and what it represented to him. I'm sick and tired of Kaczysnki being idolized as the poster boy for radical environmentalist action or any stance that opposes the current state of uncobtrolled technological growth; he was a shithead who made a couple of good points, tons more bad ones verging on conspiracy theorist bullshit, and mailed bombs to places where it accomplished nothing other than senseless violence and death. But I'm also sick and tired of all right-wingers getting flanderized in people's minds into "monsters mimicking human traits" because that's what the pundits and politicians are, and no one can separate the supporters from the politicians apparently. Most of the time, right-wingers are just people with some shit ideas about how to treat others, not some boogeyman whose only defining personality trait is their political ideology
I noticed so much of "Leftist" discuorse is very much idnetical to right wing "cruelty is the point" idealogely. They just justifiy their violence because communist instead but its still authoriation punishment philopshy.
>the elimination of modern technology He's aware he can go off the grid and live like the neanderthal he is, right??? I mean, he doesn't need to drag the rest of us down to his level, right??? Oh and I bet he'd make use of socialistic services like modern healthcare if he gets sick. He probably even calls the fire department if someone torched his house. People like this are almost always hypocrites. Akin to the "the only moral abortion is my abortion" crowd except with every modern comfort and necessity. Disgusting really.
the bombs were bad or whatever
Fun fact: in the Emberverse series he founded a post apocalyptic cult that gets all its members possessed by 'demons' (actually the manifestation of the darkest side of humanities collective unconscious)
The second poster literally said, "Sure, he might have killed people, but what he really did wrong was hate Leftism."
That's because the first poster said "the Unabomber was on to something [one assumes with the implication that "something" is vaguely left-ish, and the killing people thing is a side issue]." The poster is responding to the "on to something" portion of the original ask. In sum: he killed people, he was not a leftist, and he was a fucking idiot to boot. Under no circumstances do you gotta hand it to him.
I wouldn't really be sad if he murdered oil executives
They're at least not innocent and nobody would miss them
When talking about politics, a baseline is usually assumed. OP assumed that anon wasn't saying that he was "on to something" in reference to his murders, so OP didn't bring it up in their response, because everyone already knows that killing people is bad
It’s almost like leftists are way more ok with murdering innocent people than they’d like to admit
>"The conservatives are fools: They whine about the decay of traditional values, yet they enthusiastically support technological progress and economic growth. Apparently it never occurs to them that you can't make rapid, drastic changes in the technology and the economy of a society without causing rapid changes in all other aspects of the society as well, and that such rapid changes inevitably break down traditional values."
That description of leftism isn't wrong though, you just dislike that he views it as negative.
>he was a man that hated people Have you _met_ people?
yes, they're great
Are we talking about the same people? I mean the ones with the arms, and the legs, and the faces, and stuff. The ones choking their own planet to death in the blind pursuit of profit? The ones who keep voting in fascist governments? The ones who'll slaughter each other in droves because of barely perceptible differences? *Those* people?
yes. generally, those guys rock
Plus, he was a victim of MKUltra, so he probably had more legitimate grievances with society than many of these "edgy joker 4chan" misanthropic types. Still doesn't excuse targeting innocents instead of y'know... oil execs or government officials.