• @GloriousDoubleK@lemmygrad.ml
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    252 years ago

    …The west is ruining flamboyancy.

    Anyone else getting this weird art vs. Industrial vibe lately?

    Ive been noticing a strange trend of things lately that are being depicted as at odds with each other and it’s… Very weird.

    Like… Can we please accept that MAYBE people who work physically demanding jobs MIGHT actually enjoy flamboyancy off the clock?

    I really hope I dont sound crazy. But so much stuff seems to be signalling a queer vs. hard work vibe and Im very much not down for that.

      • @GloriousDoubleK@lemmygrad.ml
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        2 years ago

        So here is what im noticing.

        On so many fronts of this geopolitical cold war; queerness and social progressivism is being targeted as “the underpinning problem” of either the weakening of the western industrial base or the weapon of western imperialist aggression.

        And you have people like Gaga and Zelensky who arent making anything any better for the LGBTQIA.

        Either we are bourgoisie decadence; Lady Gaga being a perfect symbol of this, or we are degenerate amongst reactionaries as we complicate Christiandom and western civilization.

        Both the patriotic socialist and the fascists have agreed that being progressive and or gay is the problem as to why the west fails.

        And Gaga is being used her as a weapon of imperialist threatening. Again, one of the most flamboyant artists of the west. And shit like this gives PatSocs ammo to use hasty, sloppy politics to win over white men while the coastal reactionaries use us as representatives of western colonial violence.

        It has been for so so long a running understanding that effimate men cant use tools or be constructive… That they are weak sissies. And that knob is being cranked up harder by the reactionary spectrum.

        I could go on and on and probably write a hell of an essay about this parallel aesthetic war within this new cold war.

        But all I can say right now is that being part of the LGBT folks; I dont remember any of us asking for this.

          • @GloriousDoubleK@lemmygrad.ml
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            102 years ago

            I really just might.

            All I can say is that I find it attention grabbing that Zelensky who before the war, had a very flamboyant and near western pop status in the Ukraine and the west made a big deal of one of his flamboyant performances… And now there is this push of CIA going woke and now “PatSocs” desperately being anti SJW because they’re anti CIA and yet fail to speak to that contradiction correctly…

            It all seems very carefully deliberate.

            The PROPER synthesis in this is to reject this mechanization and utilitization of gender and sexuality and for the LGBTQIA community to denounce western imperialism and colonialism; to take a principled stand with those directly fighting off western colonialism. WHY should any gay person support Russia or Iran or even China? Because they will build a multipolar world. The LGBTQIA movement has NEVER been improved with western bombs and violence. All it does is kill millions of queer folks outside the empire. We must refuse to be used as a weapon by the west. There is no pride in genocide.

            • @afellowkid@lemmygrad.ml
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              72 years ago

              I want to recommend some reading that may help you in your project if you choose to write on this, I will give links and excerpts.


              Anti-Pinkwashing as Emerging Hope: Queering the Palestinian Liberation Movement in the Context of Institutionalised Neoliberalism by Sukrita Lahiri

              The portrayal of Islam in a certain light is essential to the success of neoliberal practices in the region. In line with this, Israel’s official 2007 campaign, “Brand Israel,” saw millions of dollars spent for this propaganda. One of the central points is “pink-washing” where Israel portrays itself as a haven for homosexuals while deliberately glossing over its occupation of Palestine. […] This phenomenon of employing gay rights as political strategy, and in this case anchored in Islamophobia, is termed by theorist Jasbir Puar as “homonationalism.” Gender is clearly an organising principle of Israeli re-pression and what needs to be looked at is whether gender is also an organising principle of Palestinian resistance. The Palestinian queer movement is deeply em-bedded in anti-pinkwashing activism and differentiates itself from Western notions of queerness.

              Historically speaking, settler colonialism has a long history of articulating its violence through the protection of certain figures such as women and children (Moghadam, 1994), and now homosexuals. Pinkwashing is just one more justification for imperial violence within this long tradition which works in part by tapping into the discursive and structural circuits produced by the West against the danger of “Islamic extremism.” In persistence of this imperial tradition, Gayatri Spivak’s (2010) well-known precept “white men saving brown women from brown men” (p. 57) gets modified with the trope of white homosexuals saving brown homosexuals from brown heterosexuals (Morris, 2010). Further, the neoliberal economic structure comfortably stretches itself to induce a compartmentalised sort of marketing of various ethnic and minoritised groups (Fraser, 2013). Thus it normalises the production of, for example, a gay and lesbian tourism industry built on the distinction between “gay-friendly” and homophobic destinations. The human rights groups voicing homosexual concerns continue to proliferate Western constructs of identity that privilege identity politics, “coming out”, increased visibility, and legislative measures as the dominant scales of social inclusion and progress.


              Toward A Scientific Analysis of the Gay Question by the Los Angeles Research Group

              The gay movement operated in the same context as […] other progressive struggles. Chief among the contradictions within the gay movement, as in other groups, was the predominance of petty-bourgeois elements. The communist forces in the gay movement were also small in number and still primitive, and got very little support for their work from other communists. Many gay communists saw anti-war work and the working class movement as more important; gay women communists saw the women’s movement as a higher priority than the gay movement. As a practical result, the gay movement was abandoned by communists to the leadership of the petty-bourgeoisie to where it is now dominated, on the one hand, by a few opportunists and reformists, […] who are bought off by government and foundation grants. […] The fact that anti-gay communists take the most conspicuous gay people for the whole points again to their one-sided, superficial and subjective approach.

              Just as men, women, heterosexuals, gays and minorities cross all class lines, any organization of these groups will reflect one or another class line at any given historical period depending on the strength and development of the different class forces. Gays are not inherently revolutionary (as some gay groups would say), nor inherently reactionary (as some “communist” groups would say). The class nature of gay liberation will change only when it is given revolutionary working class leadership. Until then, like all other groups, bourgeois ideology will fill the political vacuum. Even the working class, left to itself, can only develop trade union consciousness, which in the last analysis is bourgeois. To expect the gay movement to be any different when left without proletarian leadership is pure idealism. Gay people, particularly working class gays, are perfectly capable of enthusiastically grasping the science of Marxism Leninism and of being disciplined revolutionary fighters. To make enemies of potential allies is to abandon the working class and its interests.


              Might also want to look into the use of NGOs and how they are used to infiltrate and destabilize anti-imperialist countries, LGBT rights being one of the wedge issues they use for this, which is one of the reasons that in AES countries today there is strict control over NGOs (which gets portrayed in the west as institutional homophobia/transphobia). Pinkwashing wrt Palestine has a lot of writing on it as well, although pinkwashing can be found many other places as well. The quotes and sources listed above are in this ProleWiki article about LGBT issues in AES countries. Somewhere I also once saw an article about the history of the development of anti-LGBT laws in colonized countries, comparing differences by who they were colonized, what laws were instituted, what modern attitude toward LGBT arose from it, and relating it all to the original local culture and laws of each place (which may become re-interpreted by the locals themselves due to the colonization period). If you think that might help your writing project I will try to find it again.

              I think it’s relevant just because LGBT people in the West are often shown examples of homo/transphobia in anti-imperialist countries that strikes fear into them or at least allows them to completely write off caring about those countries, I think the pinkwashing article explains this phenomenon well.

              • Wow. Thank you. There isnt much more I could say on the subject that hasnt been said here other than the fact that it has become extremely obvious lately.

                I dont keep up on theory like this as much as others. But perhaps it says something when a casual ML starts noticing deeper trends. As in; it seems like several forces are putting in more and more work on this subject as of late to the point that even for an amature ML thinker like myself are taking notice of the game at play here.

                It is refreshing to see that im not crazy and that certain " communist" rhetoric started coming off as strangely suspicious to me when it comes to the queer question.

                • @afellowkid@lemmygrad.ml
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                  32 years ago

                  Haha thanks. Perhaps in the future I will make a post about it if I do more research into it. Most of what I would say currently can be found in that ProleWiki article. But yes I will keep it in mind as something to write about if I gain more knowledge on the topic.

          • @i_must_destroy@lemmygrad.ml
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            52 years ago

            Do you have a link to that interview? I know a lot of people I respect speak positively of his views.

            Other than that, Oliver Stone, Boots Riley, and Zack de la Roca are the only ones I can think of that know what they’re talking about. Granted, I stopped paying attention to pop stuff a while ago.

        • JucheBot1988
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          32 years ago

          There’s a little bit of truth in what Wikipedia is saying. It’s just not the whole story. The arms race didn’t destroy the USSR; liberalism did, and the gradual influx of western pop culture that occurred after Stalin accompanied a slow influx of liberal ideology into top levels of the Communist Party. The people who supported Gorbachev’s reforms (so-called) came generally from highly-paid backgrounds; they had the money to buy western goods and consume western media, and they were convinced that America and western capitalism had outgrown their earlier exploitative ruthlessness. Reagan was a right-wing extremist and a proto-fascist, but he was an anomaly (so went the fantasy); very soon, if the USSR cooperated, the peace-loving Americans would elect another progressive president like Roosevelt. Not until the Soviet collapse and the literal and figurative raping of the country that took place during the 90s did these people realize how wrong they were; a whole lot of them never learned.

    • No Más
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      102 years ago

      Kinda deserves a mention of Winds of Change, which I’m assuming is one of the many songs CIA funded with an explicit anti-USSR messaging and says a lot about “legends”, and even, dare I say, Monsters of Rock.

  • JucheBot1988
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    32 years ago

    Beijing trembles

    I think the word you’re looking for is “cringes.”