I noticed people started to use the idea of “no ethical consumption under capitalism” to just be completely irresponsible and just stop trying at all. I don’t think the point of that is to give up completely lol
Solidarity
Libs just use this to mean sympathy without any of the underlying class consciousness that really means “your suffering is mine and this unifies us”
Intersectionality
Libs just use this as a way to play oppression Olympics and rank everyone according to their intersecting identities, rather than using it to try to understand how they intersect.
Turning intersectionality into a weird pseudo phrenology
Queerphobes fuckin love their pseudo phrenology
abolish the police -> defund the police -> reform the police -> fund the police
I got whiplash from how fast that one changed in 2020
I saw someone accuse leftists of being “reactionary,” as if the term means “one who reacts.” Thankfully I don’t think they’ve really picked up on that term yet.
“reactionary,” as if the term means “one who reacts.”
Liberals actually think that it’s what it means. Political education is intentionally non-existent.
Does that make us actionary?
I guess the opposite will be proactionary.
That one is not just libs, it’s extremely widespread. I think the process is people use “reactionary” instead of “reactive”, because longer word = smarter.
every pathfinder 1e character being a Reactionary because some writer making that mistake on one of the most useful traits
“Eat the rich” and anything related to it. Literally saw some fucker say it and then specifically excuse landlords from it because they’re “middlemen”
anyone who says “eat the rich” anymore is one hundred percent a lib
It’s okay we’re all libs here
Welcome home to Hexbear, lib capital of The world
it was never a slogan for me
Middlemen for who? The buck pretty much stops there.
For the banks financing the house?
I wouldn’t call them middlemen, I would say the banks are just a third-party to the renter-rentee relationship which is direct exploitation. The banks are also exploiting, but in different ways, they’re exploiting their low level processor employees and bank tellers and the like in their own employer-employee relationship. If they are charging usurious rates on the mortgage, they are exploiting the lender-lendee relationship with the landlord. These are all separate examples of exploitation, but we believe all the exploitations should be stopped not just 2 of 3.
Also middlemen in exploitative relationships aren’t a good thing. “Cut out the middlemen” is still good practice under communism if they aren’t contributing anything. A hitman is just a “middleman” in the relationship between the victim and the one buying the hitman service. Doesn’t mean hitmen shouldn’t be abolished just like purchasing hitmen.
I have no sympathy for middlemen or the men at the end of the chain. Middle is my cut off
yeah, they’re in the middle of me and my paycheck
“Mutual aid”. Liberals use it to mean “charity” or worse, “subscribe to my patreon so I can keep posting”.
I’ve seen the same with “organizing”
i mean, that’s how we use it for the comm of the same name
Tankie
You want universal healthcare? Can’t do that. Sounds like a tankie thing to say.
You think Isreal vaporizing children is bad? God, you’re such a fucking tankie.
Tankie is when you don’t want to send tanks into ukraine
They use “tankie” because they don’t like to think that anyone could be to the left of them. The libs who call themselves leftists but support NATO and oppose protests that interrupt their morning commute are the ones that use tankie the MOST
It also lets them say “commie” without saying it, and thus without sounding rhetorically identical to the far right. This lets them preserve their delusion that they have a distinct (and left wing) political position.
‘woke’ for blue fash
I kinda got pretty fuckin sad when this happened because like
It does pertain to some very specific kinds of leftists, generally the ones who are uneducated and authoritarian. But now it just gets used as a prejorative for any leftist who is willing to match rightwing violence with leftwing violence.
Like, if you just let right wingers do violence because “freeze peach” and you constantly hamper left wingers’ actions, you cannot expect any other outcome than the right wing seizing control in an authoritarian manner.
There is only one cure for fascism, and that’s armor-penetrating rounds. That being said, you can obviously take action without your little armalite at your side, but at this point it really should be disruptive.
Was always a chauvinist left-punching term from day one. Wasn’t “co-opted” so much as “went viral for its intended purpose”
yes, I do want to send in military force to crush anti-semitic pogroms in Hungary. I am literally the worst person politically, ever
say it loud, tankie and proud
Free Palestine (from Hamas)
I haven’t heard it that often so maybe people are actually rooting the liberals out before they take hold.
“Cultural Appropriation”
“Grassroots”
Basically all of Therapy-speak being applied on a political level (calling your enemies “Narcissists”, etc.).
Oh my lord applying individual psychology speak to nations/states drives me crazy. Not a thing leftists do so they haven’t co-opted it. If I have to hear the language of domestic abuse or trauma counselling or whatever the fuck applied to countries and geopolitics one more time I will explode.
Ah, not true the post-modernist left did in fact apply psychological terms to entire societies. Specifically, schizophrenia if I remember correctly from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Lacan also loved mixing psychology and sociology.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalism_and_Schizophrenia
Not the greatest fan of these works, but at least they are being specific and academic in their usage and have psychological training. Modern libs are bastardizing even that.
Also I think it’s much more valid to point towards a society as a whole as a social organism, and attempt to apply similar mental conditions to see if it makes any sense - at least in an academic thought experiment type of way, I don’t think it has much explanatory power personally. However, libs instead just say “Trump is a narcissist. Putin is a sociopath. Kim Jong Un is a psychopath.” etc. which is much more of an issue as they’re just armchair psychologizing other people without any formal training whatsoever in order to smear political opponents. It’s chauvinist, it’s ableist, it’s straight charlatanism
Very interesting! I wasn’t aware of these works and I can see what they are trying to get at, so yet another thing libs have to ruin. The examples you use at the end are definitely along the lines of what I was thinking about though.
my reading of that book was that Deleuze was suggesting it as a way to fight capitalist control over thought and behavior – i.e. if you think and behave in a way that’s non-rational, you can escape the capitalist mind prison. idk though, it’s a very hard book to read because it takes post-structuralism farther than the post-structuralists did and adopts his own thesis. so it’s entirely possible I’m misreading him. he expands, in a more elucidating manner, in Societies of Control, so it’s worth reading that as context for the book.
“Grassroots” is one that pisses me off. I got a email from the Biden canvassing fucks that asked me to donate to Biden because he was starting a “grassroots movement to win”. I was like y’all know he’s the motherfucking state, right?
The word libertarianism went from anarchists wanting liberty to repping for neo-feudalism
Ah spamming Bookchin videos on r/libertarian was a fun time
This was also done to the term anarchist, to some extent.
Right-libertarians loathe when you bring up the relevant quotes from Murray Rothbard.
Oldie, but “a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character”. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was effectively talking about a post-socialist revolution where serious reparations were made and society was equalised in meaningful ways that would allow the world to be both fairer and more meritocratic.
Libs say it means addressing historic injustice is evil and that now the most explicit mentions of race are out of written law and addressed nothing else, Dr King would 100% approve of modern America.
“Acknowledgement” that turned from a good faith recognition of unearned power, comfort, or stability but became a rote “land acknowledgement” or “privilege check”
No I’m pretty sure enough acknowledgement turns into money and homes for the people being acknowledged
“Emotional Labor” losing the work context meets this imo. Definitely very frustrating.
Ya people complaining that being a decent friend and listening to other people vent sometimes is too much “emotional labor” is some kind of expression of some terrible process of neoliberalism and atomization
This one kills me, when I read the original definition and realized that people were studying the forced emotions required of customer service workers it felt good, like, almost relieving, that an academic, someone in a position of authority, recognized and took seriously the toll that that takes.
Now it means like, listening to your friend complain about their boss or something?
I’m not even upset that “the strain of hearing about other people’s hardships” has a term to describe it, but why use one that was describing the way servers, baristas, flight attendants, cashiers and call center agents have to maintain a constant appearance of happiness while being degraded by the people speaking to them?
Yeah, it also sucks because if you try to explain that “emotional labor” has a specific meaning it makes you the bad guy for invalidating someone.
People also use it as a defense from having to do self-crit.
Colonialism, genocide, and imperialism. The savages scraping shit off the boots of NATO with their tongues will look at you with their shit filled mouths and unironically say “we must protect xyz from abc imperialism”
However, there’s also another reason that most people probably aren’t thinking of. I become unreasonably irritated whenever I see someone post some stupid baby talk shit like “They’re doing a genocide” or “they’re being genocided” or “stop doing an imperialism.” Sometimes their views even align with mine, yet I want to dropkick them to hell for invoking millennial pupper talk for this topic. If you’re learning English, that’s completely reasonable to write - but if the only language you speak is english then
That Lenin quote about supporting electoralism that libs selectively cited to make him sound as if he would have supported voting for Biden. Of course, they always left out the part where he specified voting for communist parties.
I had to struggle not to laugh when someone cited this one at me in a DSA meeting. he was very disappointed when I told him to read the rest of the page. very glad I left.
Yeah, when I was DSA it seemed like everyone knew capitalism was fucked but the only answer anyone could think of was canvass and vote harder. I moved on to an actively anarchist org and we never talk politics - only how we can better do the work.
ACAB when the definition of cops becomes “anyone who seeks to enforce standards or act in defence”.
“Become ungovernable” as a slogan that occasionally gets used to justify wrecker behaviour and self-serving egotistic actions.
I guess these two are interrelated but imagine if you said something blatantly racist in a less-than principled leftist space but you strategically deployed the slogans “ACAB” against the people calling you out and used “become ungovernable” as a justification for your actions; you could easily split a movement by doing something like this.
To a lesser extent, “it is right to rebel” gets used for the same sorts of purposes. It’s divorced from its cultural and historical context; China around Mao’s era was very hierarchical and society was very strictly centred around “conformity” (using shorthand here, don’t come at me). Under these circumstances, it was absolutely right to rebel and exhorting people to rebel was the correct course.
That doesn’t mean that it’s somehow a tacit endorsement of contemporary western liberal hyper-individualism though. If anything the western left needs a good dose of “Shut the fuck up and learn how to fall in line because your petty bickering and your blind adherence to knee-jerk, cultish individualism is a major roadblock to advancing the cause of socialism”.
