This makes me wonder why I’ve never heard this perspective before?

Well, I am not a progressive, for one. I agree with some principles but I disagree fundamentally on what a world that fulfills those principles looks like, so I can sympathise with the members of the movement but I find them misguided at best and actively hostile to my other principles at worst.

In fact, I know I proposed some ideas antithetical to some (IMO wrong) dogmas of the progressive movement, such as doing away with the politeness nuclar standoff, the tone policing, etc, not only because they’re actively hobbling the movement and making it politically irrelevant, though they are, but because they are things I find fundamentally detrimental to society at large if they were to ever become more mainstream than they already were until the recent fall out of favour of progressivism in the american zeitgeist. (And when america gets a cold the rest of the world starts sneezing)

I wonder if people say this in mostly conservative forums, and I just don’t see it from my personal fish bowl?

Perhaps, I wouldn’t know. I’m just a European liberal who has to sit on the sidelines and quietly hate american politics for polluting the rest of the world with its fumes, tilting the scales in favour of the far right as a backswing to a “far left” political climate that literally never materialised in our own countries just because your progressive movement’s optics are bad enough to be fucking radioactive.

It’s almost as if it would have been useful for this position to be expressed earlier to educate people before all the frustration occurred.

We tried to tell you and were called every single name under the sun.

Hell, I got told in this very thread that I want to create spaces hostile to women, by some coward who then deleted all their posts in response to me asking for a clarification as to why.

American liberals, do yourselves a favour and cut out the progressive activist tumor from your political sphere, let the far left deal with them, and just actually stick to your principles, if you still have any that aren’t entirely based on reflexively doing the opposite of what the right says. (Yes I am bitter, how could you tell?)

I’m sorry that’s just rad as hell, masculinity has nothing to do with it, that’s just great taste.

that most cheaters are never given a second chance

Source on that, also even then, the ones who are prove the statistic to be quite reliable. See here for the effects on both the cheater and the victim.

Considering the effects on the victim (suspicion even on non-cheating partners for years) you actually don’t deserve a second chance, even if you were on the straight and narrow for the rest of your life.

It’d be like you intentionally smashed his kneecap then stayed with him out of guilt to help him walk.

right but the norm is already changing on so many other issues why is this an exception ?

Cause this change is actively immoral and harmful and people don’t want it, duh.

Things change because people want them to change. They don’t want this to change because they don’t want to enable potential cheaters in their lives, because as something becomes less socially stigmatised the less of a barrier there is to actually doing it.

when he posted we were back together on his social media he had tons of people come out of the woodwork to tell him not to take me bac and I was a worthless woman that deserved no rights

See here’s the thing: a person who is able to rationalise something morally unjustifiable once, will be able to do it again.

By cheating you showed everyone you have no real spine to speak of, you can rationalise it all you like (that’s part of the problem) but the reality is that when you had the choice to break up and pursue the other person or not and cheat, you managed to talk yourself into accepting betraying the supposedly most important person in your life.

Moreover, there is absolutely no way for you to ever prove you won’t do it again until you die, and even then some people will still be skeptical even if you never do it again, and they’d be correct to be.

You may have grown a sense of respect for other people’s trusts, or you may have gotten better at cheating, or your boyfriend may have settled for a serial cheater and decided to turn the other way.

Either way they are trying to spare him from this AND to prevent society at large from accepting cheaters back into relationships because nobody, not even cheaters like you, wants cheating to be done to them, and making it something you can come back from makes it more likely.

ETA: given your post history, this one especially, you probably are getting shat on simply because you, specifically, deserve it, not because people hate cheaters in general (though we do).

Your first post on this topic is literally a thinly veiled “Why would my mid-ass boyfriend not take me back? He’s mid and I am letting him fuck me, why would he think he deserves better?”

The answer was in the post history all along: people are telling him to drop you because you are lower than pond scum and they see through you. I pity him for being indeed mid and spineless enough to have accepted you back.

I don’t know if he genuinely didn’t understand or if he was too embarrassed to admit to a mistake

Worse, he actively lied. In his edited video about the petition he actively misrepresents the initiative, then goes on to edit out the the part of Ross’ video that would have contradicted his misrepresentation.

This is not an innocent or negligent mistake on Thor’s part, it’s an active attempt at burial.

Are you under the impression that the term “TERF” was invented in 2008 because that’s when trans exclusion became a thing?

Do you seriously think that a movement that over its lifespan at some point didn’t even include non-white women started off including non-female ones?

“Trans x are x” as a widespread progressive sociological stance is new, I don’t even know if it’s 20 years old, it may be closer to 10, even.

there is a point at whoch your movement is compromised so much that winning doesn’t matter because the common goals of the movement are no longer desirable.

That’s why movements should be built around goals and not allegiance/morality.

“This is the movement to achieve X.”

“X has been achieved.”

“Aight, job well done, time to move on.”

This is what the right does (or tries to, anyway), and they’re eating the left alive, maybe it’s worth taking this very non-partisan strategy from their playbook?

violence is bad, you have to hear the nazi out

AKA the same provision that protects everyone with an unpopular opinion, yourself included, yes. That’s what liberal democracies do.

The state has a monopoly on violence, you don’t get to decide who doesn’t get rights, nor do the nazis.

The US is a bit of an exception obviously, you guys love your political violence (one could say you are built on it) and who am I to stop you, but Europe does not work that way and thank fuck for that, lol.

So yeah you have to let the nazi speak, that doesn’t mean you can’t talk over them, mock them, goad them into striking first so the cops will crack down on them, etc.

I’m Italian so I guarantee you I know that it’s a complex landscape to navigate, with actual fascists (the roman salute kind, not the “we’re cops and we will do our job” ““fascists””) in a lot of police strike teams, and in the current government (Thankfully I live abroad, shit’s bad at home right now), I know it’s no picnic to actually maintain a liberal society, but other countries consistently succeed, like France and the Netherlands, or the nordics.

It takes effort and a lot of education from early on, and that the population appreciates the importance of that education and the values it is supposed to impart.

Conversely it was “me ne frego” and the widespread apathy towards it that condemned italy to Mussolini’s rule, not civil debate.

Moreover, allowing and embracing political violence doesn’t work when one side is already chomping at the bit and better at it than your side, but that’s a practical consideration rather than an ethical/moral one.

Mind you this does not mean “don’t defend yourself” it means “don’t strike first”

Embrace the Roman doctrine: we will never pick up arms first, but if forced to we will only lay them second.

IMO it depends on how much you value being morally correct vs overall effectiveness of the movement.

And this entire thought process is why the left gets weaker every round of elections.

See for instance: Abandon Harris, a movement thought by absolute winners at the brain lottery, who thought that undermining the candidate who didn’t ban middle easterners from entering the US was the smart choice because Biden was “too lenient against Israel.”

Politics is about seizing and wielding power, morality has nothing to do with it.

For one, any grifter can pretend to be more morally correct than you or I and once they get in power they will do whatever they want anyway. I would much rather side with someone who disagrees with me on some things but does so in earnest than someone who is suspiciously always somehow more moral and more correct than me or them.

For two, morality is literally incompatible with politics, because it is downstream from the body politic.

For instance: It is considered immoral to own slaves, today. It used to be allowed and to the mores of the time, uncontroversial.

Then enough people who disagreed with that stance pushed to gain power and made it illegal, once that became the status quo for long enough it is now controversial to hold a position that was the default and viceversa.

Something becomes a matter of morality once it is no longer a matter of politics.

In practice, you don’t actually need support for all your ideas, you need enough good ideas to get you enough support that you can then push through your less popular pet issues. Even better if the pet issues themselves are popular, that’s when you get explosive successes like Trump getting re-elected by hammering the inflation button (despite anyone who knows anything about econ knowing he would be literally unable to do anything about it).

As long as people are not actively against your pet issues they’ll re-elect you just fine, that’s how croneyism skates by unnoticed.

Keep in mind I’m not saying to accept TERFs, I’m saying to be smart about letting them cut themselves off instead of forcing them out.

They were here before you, just because you disagree with them doesn’t make them not feminists.

This is a great example of what I meant, btw: progressives act like every protestant denomination, calling eachother “not real christians” not realising they are all the same brand of sanctimonious.

Given the fact that there is a massive backswing towards the right in most of the west, very much riding a wave against progressive politics, with the largest gender divide in viting demographics on record in the US, and a republican winning the popular vote for the first time since Bush’s second term?

US Progressives need to worry about this, not everyone else. Everyone else is telling progressives to shove off.

“Progress” does not exist, only marxists think history is a linear path from bad to good, reality is a bit more complex. (a good answer to pretty much any of Marx’s arguments, incidentally)

If you want your worldview to win, and your worldview is both against the ruling class, its supporters, and doing anything to onboard them? You’re just not going to win. You’re not going to win even if you were to execute a revolution because you just don’t have any measurable support.

So, unless you just want to circlejerk about how right you are and accomplish nothing, you should look into how to get the people on your side, very much including the demographic that makes up most of the politicians.

I have a bit of a preconceived notion as to why you are saying this, however I would rather ask you to be more specific before jumping to conclusions. Can you give concrete examples as to how my suggestions would alienate women?

This is all from the perspective of a non-american from a country where thankfully we are still liberal at heart and only entertain some progressive ideas, instead of buying it wholesale, meaning the right has yet to completely cannibalise the government over the mistakes of the left.

1. Move away from equity and return to equality of opportunity as the main goal. Equity demands lack of competition, and men love competition.

You can want everyone to receive equal opportunity and dignity, but people are not equal and will not end in the same place once the race is over. You can’t demand equality of outcome and onboard the most competitive demographic, there is a reason if the stereotype of leftist men is passive wimps. This is completely compatible with prgressive ideas, but it’s incompatible with progressive brains, apparently.

2. Actually understand what intersectionality looks like, stop treating it like a hierarchy of oppression.

The core idea of intersectionality is that each demographic has its own issues and they manifest differently if more demographics overlap in the same individual (e.g. sexism against white women vs sexism against black women exhibit different tropes and connotations).

This does not mean whoever has the least minoritary traits is the most acceptable target, that is some marxist “oppressor vs oppressed” horseshit and, while it was probably the intended idea, it is massively counterproductive and doesn’t have to be the actual application of the issue.

Men have issues that women don’t have, women have issues that men don’t have. As soon as your movement decides to prioritise one they have lost the other.

The reason this does not happen with race is that no movement in the US can realistically exist politically without white people simply by virtue of how huge the white slice of the demo pie is, and because this whole thing was started by highly educated, economically mobile, overwhelingly white, college grads who live in very specific coastal bubbles, hence the endemic hatred of farmers and factory workers, the actual working class of the US, as hicks and racists, and the lionisation of serving staff like baristas and waiters (the only working class most large city dwellers ever interact with).

3. Move away from “patriarchy”.

It’s just a fucking L on its face isn’t it? “Yes come join the party that thinks men being in power is the problem” fat fucking chance lol.

And when they do join, the parodies write themselves.

I don’t care if you think it’s “just a name” (especially in light of what progs consistently do over “just a name” and “just a statue” and so on) it’s a massive optics L that shows all of the horseshit about microaggressions and non-confrontational language and whatnot are entirely performative.

You have the most obvious othering language in the core ideas of the movement and then complain about microaggressions? And you wonder why people don’t take you seriously?

And while we’re on that:

4. Politeness is baseline, respect is earned. Confrontation is necessary and men are more likely to thrive in confrontational spaces.

You can’t have a political movement that does not tolerate dissent and confrontation, or only tolerates it in one direction. See the implosion of the “Unfuck america tour” as a good example of this.

The whole point of politics is to create a critical mass of people who align on some goal to push for it, you don’t have to agree with them on every point, if you had enough people who agree with you, you would be already in the majority and would not need to participate in politics.

Easy example from the last decade: TERFs.

Now, I don’t like TERFs, on account of them being radfems and thus automatically hostile to me due to the circumstances of my birth (i.e. penis), but you know what? I reckon they probably want women to have better salaries and fewer barriers to entry into professional fields.

Let them force themselves into political irrelevance if they refuse to play ball, don’t make a big fucking show of kicking them out of the movement, because then you end up on the back foot of having to explain “trans women are women” to the mass population and the TERFs simply need to say “look at these brainwashed biology deniers, they think males and females have no differences” and you end up eating your own ass in public, when the point is that trans women ought to be treated as women for their own good and a more welcoming society.

(side note: if you are in that brainless chunk of progs who do believe there is no difference between the sexes, I highly encourage you to look at the world records in any discipline with easily measured metrics such as 100m dash and freestyle swimming. Not a single male record is under the women’s record, in some cases every historical male record eclipses the current female one. Males and females are different, this should be acknowledged, and it should not be a barrier to equal dignity in treatment.)

A movement that can’t include anyone but the most in-line and pure of the ideological adepts is doomed to be irrelevant, and on that the progressives have an almost complete lock.

Disclaimer: I only tangentially follow WWE

Firstly I think that if HHH gets comedy wrestling at all, he has a completely different sense of humour from VKM. I could not tell you a current WWE comedy act, and the man himself was such an edgy metalhead in his days that it makes me think he’s incapable of understanding how tryhard and poser-ish he came across, which makes me think he’s not great at getting irony.

Secondly, proof is in the pudding, this is not the “VKM fucks shit up, everyone else keep up or get fired” era, yet Truth got let go without warning and Hunter did nothing to stop it, despite him being over and basically a lifer.

We know he went to bat for and rehired people who were let go during the VKM days as soon as he was given the authority to do so, authority that only increased since.

That would imply they cared, and I think hhh doesn’t care for mr Truth.

Both Arkham Knight and Witcher 3 exist on steam so the comparison is possible either way

Oh god you have no idea how many believe this in earnest (╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻

They are authoritarian and marxist leftists, they are not mutually exclusive, if anything they are more likely bedfellows than not, by necessity.

You can’t have a free economy without decentralised price controls (i.e. a market) and you can’t have a market without ownership, so you will eventually end up having a control economy if you remove private ownership from the equation, and control economies are fundamentally authoritarian.

The ultimate means of production is the person, and you don’t get to own it exclusively, even if it’s yourself.