I think there's also an element of narcissistic gnosticism here too.
The Social Justice disciple blessed with a higher "critical consciousness" doesn't need to worry about mortal trivialities like facts, reason, reality etc, they have been blessed with a higher form of spiritual knowledge that personally connects them to the sacred (and sets them above the rest of us).
The Marxist "ruthless criticism of all that exists" seems to reach its terminus and/or apotheosis in the minds of our young utopian radicals, who know nothing because all things that can be known have already been sentenced to death for their crimes against the egalitarian future (so what's the point?) and who live with their eyes always fixated on their handheld mirrors aka the dopamine crack pipes we call "phones", which always tell them that they are the fairest of them all, as well as the wisest and most "empathetic". They imagine themselves residing at the apex of all human wisdom and morality, thus there's no point in thinking, debating, in empirical testing and re-evaluation or in compromise. There's really nothing left to do but "raise awareness" (of themselves) and join the armies of the Good in their battle to destroy the armies of the Evil (everyone not in their tribe).
The 21st-century children of the Permanent Revolution are like toddlers who visit your home and smash everything they can get their tiny hands on. They will destroy anything that doesn't flatter them or feed their desires and will call it "liberation". How could they ever be wrong, misguided or wicked when everyone and everything they know tells them the opposite?
They're called toddlers because they haven't yet discovered that they aren't the at the center of the cosmos. But perhaps the same may be applied to our adult adolescents of the "Permanent Revolution".
This indoctrination program in the Humanities has been running for over five decades. I saw it first hand beginning to peak in 1998-2000.
It functions as a toolbox to develop personal power through carefully crafted language tools. What makes it so attractive is that while you are building your power base, you also cultivate the sense of moral superiority. It's a delicious recipe.
You are placing yourself as the ultimate patron over the weak and the powerless. Your education becomes a weapon of justice. If you allow free debate and open inquiry, it reduces your power. The pleasure of power tickles the base of the brain stem.
You betcha. Just watch the nasty cunts on The View toss constant offhand sneering insults at the lumpen proletariat in flyover country. Their braindead audience - whom security would stop from ever trying to approach The Holy Stage - laughs along, nodding their hollow skulls at who collectively smarter they all are.
The Jacobins were big fans of feelings and sensibility. Robespierre said: "To love justice and equality the people need no great effort of virtue; it is sufficient that they love themselves".
Self-righteousness tends to be a fine guide for poor judgment, or... “People are never more sincere than when they assume their own moral superiority.” — Thomas Sowell
Idea for a book: 'Great Sayings Debunked'. Maybe it has already been written - perhaps by a critical theorist? (My personal bête noire is "Cogito Ergo Sum")
It can be summed up simply as tribal warfare, motivated by tribal instincts surfacing inappropriately in the modern world. And it's not entirely irrational.
Queers for Palestine don't care that their views are internally inconsistent because they are marching to support Muslims who reliably vote left wing, and thus through this kind of tribal alliance they tactically increase their own power. They don't plan to actually go to Gaza, and they calculate (subconsciously) that the liberal regime they have in place is strong enough that allying with Muslims won't result in any gays they know actually getting stoned down the road from themselves, so it's pure win - more power for the left, no downsides.
This IS rational, whether we like it or not, it's just "rational" over a short timeframe. But the leftists don't plan on letting their allies actually gain control. At worst, they think, the Muslims will be allowed to stone their own gays, but not the sort of white gays found with blue hair studying humanities at Harvard. Not people like themselves. That would certainly still yield an investigation and crushing response. And there's nothing inconsistent about them wanting that.
That's exactly what happened in Iran when the current crew took power. The Islamists and Marxists both considered each other to useful idiots. When the Shah was toppled, the Muslims struck first and killed all of their leftist "allies".
That is also exactly what will happen in the UK and elsewhere if the Muslims attain power.
Beautifully put. One of the greatest tricks Marx pulled was to be the 19th century L. Ron Hubbard. He created a New Religion out of whole cloth - and in Marx's case, one of the facets of the trick was to claim that his new belief structure (in complete denial of observable reality) is that it is NOT a religion at all, which implies belief in the unseen, but is a betterer, smarterer, more cleverer way of "truly seeing" reality.
I call the modern left 'the elastic ideology,' because it stretches to expand almost any position that is tactically advantageous in the short-term. At its deepest level, it wants to radically dismantle traditional structures and remake society but it will often pretend to embrace folk wisdom or morality or commonsense criminal justice notions... until it gains enough power. Then it will dispense with these notions, which it really despises. This approach is fundamentally unethical and intellectually dishonest, but these aren't constraints for believers who openly disdain the concepts of virtue and ethics and truth and logic.
The closer the left moves towards radical success, the more the mask slips. The fact that our progressives have become so wild-eyed and unreasonable in the estimation of so many centrist voters isn't just a mark of their own disconnection and delusion. It's also an indication that their cultural project is, in many ways, succeeding. If they only could've permanently diluted the concepts of gender and sex roles they would've been within sight of the finish line, I think. We should all fear the hell that would result.
So if proving inconsistencies or arguing are not going to win, and will merely put you in a weaker position, with the left in control of culture—how exactly do you defeat them? What method do you use? I agree with your conclusion but I’d like to see the next step. There are a lot of ideas out there, none of which seems actually doable without society turning into something truly ugly and therefore defeating the whole point.
Yes, it is a genuine conundrum. My ideas on this are still developing, but there is a lot of things that can be done without being nastily illiberal. Force non-profits to wind up after a certain time (i.e. extend the law against perpetuities). Deny any taxpayer funding to activist scholarship. Abolish arts and research grants—replace the latter with block grants to STEM that require at least 30% of funding to go on replication studies. Require nurse, teacher and journalist training to go back to an intern/apprenticeship model. That sort of measure.
For the details of change to fall into place, a new animating force needs to arise to drive it. It has to come from the innate desire and will of 'most of the people' or 'the strongest (elite) of the people.' Right now the will of the people is either flaccid or actively destructive.
I think what's needed can happen, I'm just not yet seeing what form it'll take. Posts like yours are good for the process and thanks for that.
It's more about social control than anything else.
You see the same thing with Communism in China - you might have noticed their 'communism' has a lot of capitalistic qualities, yet they still embrace it. The reason is that it forces people to express their loyalty publicly, and gives them an opportunity to see who is insufficiently loyal to 'the cause'.
These people (like academics, religious folks, free-thinkers, etc.) pose a threat to those at the top because they aren't willing to blindly follow the herd. Thus, they can be singled out for further indoctrination until they break or are eliminated altogether, not unlike how people questioning DEI policies are sent for further 'sensitivity training' or 'cancelled'.
I know that there is a shared reality independent of individual consciousness, because if you get in a car accident the insurance carriers determine who pays by who is at fault. If there was no objective reality, it would always be 50/50. Metaphysics is easy.
Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guildmaster and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, that each time ended, either in the revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.
I don't remember reading about patrician and plebians being at odds in Rome or Athens. Everyone had their place and some people worked hard to better themselves.
The Lord and Serf were tied together with bonds stronger than steel. Serfs stayed in one place and worked the land, while the Lord provided them with protection. The guildmaster and Journeyman worked together as well, some for better, some for worse. But without the guildmaster, the journeyman wouldn't have a career. Guilds were how one got jobs.
Imagine a blue haired freak telling a survivor of Iranian independence, should it ever happen, that freeing them is wrong. It's gaslighting of the worst kind.
I'm sorry but this is almost pathologically uninsightful and deceptive; it describes at best a tiny subset of the groups in question.
I could torch this whole essay but I'll just focus on one bit: while there is a "Queers for Palestine" group, there is no organization iirc called "Feminists for Hamas". That's fake and you completely made it up. The former can be quite radical because they're young and foolish generally, but there's no philosophical inconsistency in having ordinary liberal politics towards Israel and also having ordinary liberal feminist sympathies/LGBT-tolerant views. This is a good reason why you shouldn't form your personal convictions in reaction to the most radical people you encounter online, and why you *especially* shouldn't publish bad essays elevating and mischaracterizing their ideology - this whole thing is just a human centipede of ignorance.
Okay one other thing: overzealous leftists aren't inspired in any meaningful way by Marx and Engels. They barely read anything at all! This is all just totally out-of-touch navel-gazing.
I never said there was a group called Feminists for Hamas/Hezbollah/Iran, I linked to people who declare themselves feminists and support Hams/Hezbollah/Iran.
And repeated patterns are repeated patterns. Yes, a lot of these useful idiots have never read Marx or Engels. But the people who developed Critical Theory absolutely have. Such Critical Theory then leads to all its spin offs—Critical Race Theory, Queer Theory, Critical Pedagogy, etc. That then generates the ideological tropes and moralised status games we can repeatedly see.
Lots of people have never read Marcuse, or his essay on repressive tolerance, but you absolutely see his ideas re-packaged to justify politically selective censorship.
This is why you see such repeated patterns. From DEI generating commissars (DEI officers, etc), to genderwoo and Critical Social Justice generating Lysenkoism in science publishing to conformity in the arts and literary scene generating Zhadonovism. Talk to any ex-Soviets, they will enlighten you with the patterns they recognise.
The same foundational ideas have the same consequences.
No less an academic luminary than Judith Butler called Hamas part of the global left. Another left luminary, Slavoj Zizek, doubted the atrocities of October 7. These people are not ignorant online trolls but the 21st century equivalent of the intellectuals who supported Hitler (Heidegger) and Stalin (Duranty). In other words, they follow the discursive logic of Marxism and Nazism: if you are against the Enemy (capitalism and liberal democracy), you are a friend and an ally.
Okay but these are not "Queers for Palestine"-types. Ostensibly this essay is trying to find a philosophical origin point for silly rank-and-file leftists, who are just overzealous 19-year-olds who don't read. When a piece fails to be explanatory about a broad group of people, it can't just evolve into some amorphous attack on some washed up leftist who no one listens to anymore. There's also a deceptive conflation of people with ordinary liberal views on Middle East foreign policy (who simultaneously hold socially tolerant views on women and LGBT people, which is no contradiction at all), and campus left revolutionary cosplayer-types. It also doesn't seem like "the issue is revolution" really comes up at all in this analysis. This is all just very lazily put together for cheap approval from people who see easy punching bags being attacked and it would be received the same way no matter what the substance of the piece was.
I don’t know what “liberal views on Middle East foreign policy” means, but it certainly does not mean support for Hamas. The essay was correct in identifying a major contradiction between support for Islamism abroad and ostensible support for feminism at home. It has now become a major feature of the activist discourse on campuses. Whatever you call these students, they are not idiots who can’t read. The red-green alliance is real, and is getting some electoral victories in the UK. So, it’s quite right to ask how one can be in favor of Islamism AND in favor of women’s and gay rights. Either the latter are universal or they are not.
If you don't know what "ordinary liberal views on Middle East foreign policy" means, then I have... questions, since I don't know how someone can be ignorant of the foreign policy leanings of an entire side of the political spectrum while also having confident views on anything else political. This is a microcosm of my main objection to this piece and others in the same genre, just a total detachment from what actually matters or happens in the world.
Also, I didn't say they *can't* read, I said they *don't*. Like, that's just descriptively true - you think these kids are reading Marx and Engels? Seriously? The idiots who say "Hamas are actually decolonizing Israel!" are not serious thinkers nor are they inspired by them. You have to take their professed radicalism and part of the foolishness of youth, not some ideology whose philosophical underpinnings need to be meticulously studied.
I'll close by just saying I teach at a college and pretty much my entire close circle is leftists/left-leaning; might I suggest that I have a better idea of the kind of profile of person this article is attempting to describe?
First, I am a university professor, so I do know what my students are reading. Second, ideologies are perpetuated by cultural osmosis rather than by deep study of certain texts. Millions of people are Christians without reading the entire Bible; millions are Muslims without reading the Quran: and millions are Marxists without reading Das Kapital. The logic of an ideology that propels people into radicalism is more important than their individual philosophies, such as they are. And liberal views on the Middle East mean that you oppose Islamism and every regime and organization that supports it. If you support Hamas, Iran or Hezbollah, you cannot be a liberal.
So much bulverism that can be simply refuted by the fact that there is no internal inconsistency. You can support the rights of gay people and also support Palestine, because you don’t need to agree with people to care about their interests.
It’s as simple as that. You’d be able to think more clearly if you tried to extend more charity to your ideological opponents.
You cannot support gay rights and support Hamas or the Islamic Regime that both kill homosexuals. You cannot support women’s rights and support Hamas or the Islamic Regime that religiously demand and enforce the subordination of women. The contradiction is obvious.
If such folk condemned Hamas or the Islamic Regime, then that would be different, but they don’t.
It depends what you mean by ‘support’, but the only sense of the word which would create an inconsistency is ‘endorse everything they say, think or do’ and I don’t really that’s a common position at all with respect to Hamas or Iran on the left (or anywhere else).
You can very easily support gay rights and also Hamas in its war with Israel, specifically. That doesn’t mean you should, but there’s no inconsistency.
The premise of this article is just you making a fairly rudimentary logical error.
People ‘can’ do all sorts of inconsistent things. But if you define yourself by an identity group and then support an organisation or state that makes its business to suppress, particularly brutally and murderously that identity group, then yes, there is an obvious contradiction there.
This could as well be a reply to my original comment. It’s like you literally did not register my reply.
As I JUST said, there’s no contradiction in supporting Hamas in an entirely different endeavour, unrelated to gay rights. If you disagree, please make your argument explicitly instead of just repeating the conclusion. Why would that be inconsistent? What is the contradiction?
Supporting Hamas and Iran means supporting people who kill gays. That is flagrantly against gay rights.
Supporting Hamas and Iran means supporting people who actively force women to be second rank citizens subordinated to men. That is a flagrant denial of feminism.
If you identity as Queer or feminist you can only support Hamas or the Islamic Republic by utterly subordinating that support over what happens to gay folk in Palestine and Iran, what happens to women in Palestine and Iran.
In which case, you are applying the politics of the Friend/Enemy distinction is precisely the way I say in my post.
No, you can just disagree with someone on one thing and nonetheless support them in another.
Like how I disagree with you about this, but if you were wrongfully imprisoned by the government I would support you in that. It wouldn’t imply endorsement of your every view or act, but simply entail supporting you *in that specific context*, whatever I might think of anything else about you, because you’re on the right side of that specific issue.
And if people were saying ‘don’t you see the contradiction in supporting him when he believes [one of the many things I infer you to believe that I’m vehemently opposed to], I’d tell them they should raise their level of thinking beyond blind tribal allegiance and into the realm of principled reason.
I've seen vast amounts of support for the Palestinians from all sorts of leftist lunatics, and not a single peep from them in criticism of anything. As far as I can tell, these clown actually endorse everything they say, think or do.
If you could point me to some examples of Gays for Palestine and similar outfits criticising the execution of gay people and the stoning of women in Palestine and Iran, that'd be great.
That’s a failure of your engagement with your ideological opponents- and a genuinely staggering one for someone speaking so confidently about a topic they clearly haven’t attempted to learn about at all, given how quick this google search was- not a failure of your ideological opponents themselves.
Here’s maybe the most prominent ‘queers for Palestine’ figure (he literally wrote the book), doing a whole interview dedicated to discussing this very objection:
Here’s an article prominently featured on the website of one of the most prominent ‘queers for Palestine’ style organisations (from 2013 by the way), discussing why they believe this is a misleading trope and Israeli oppression of Palestinian people is the more important issue to address:
You may not agree with the responses- I think they vary considerably in their honesty and quality of argument myself- but the idea that this ostensible contradiction has not been addressed by the activists you criticise reveals nothing but your own fairly blinding lack of familiarity with the subject you speak so confidently about.
The idiot who ypu say wrote the book on the subject also said "That being said, homophobia is not unique to Palestinian society. It exists in most parts of the world". Of course, in most parts of the world gays aren't killed by the state.
Just a worthless steaming pile of deflection.
You write confidently and aggressively about something of which you are both ignorant and delusional.
The Gays for Palestine are overwhelmingly supportive of the Hamas reign of terror in Gaza, and they're still chickens for KFC. To suggest otherwise is simply stupid.
I think there's also an element of narcissistic gnosticism here too.
The Social Justice disciple blessed with a higher "critical consciousness" doesn't need to worry about mortal trivialities like facts, reason, reality etc, they have been blessed with a higher form of spiritual knowledge that personally connects them to the sacred (and sets them above the rest of us).
The Marxist "ruthless criticism of all that exists" seems to reach its terminus and/or apotheosis in the minds of our young utopian radicals, who know nothing because all things that can be known have already been sentenced to death for their crimes against the egalitarian future (so what's the point?) and who live with their eyes always fixated on their handheld mirrors aka the dopamine crack pipes we call "phones", which always tell them that they are the fairest of them all, as well as the wisest and most "empathetic". They imagine themselves residing at the apex of all human wisdom and morality, thus there's no point in thinking, debating, in empirical testing and re-evaluation or in compromise. There's really nothing left to do but "raise awareness" (of themselves) and join the armies of the Good in their battle to destroy the armies of the Evil (everyone not in their tribe).
The 21st-century children of the Permanent Revolution are like toddlers who visit your home and smash everything they can get their tiny hands on. They will destroy anything that doesn't flatter them or feed their desires and will call it "liberation". How could they ever be wrong, misguided or wicked when everyone and everything they know tells them the opposite?
They're called toddlers because they haven't yet discovered that they aren't the at the center of the cosmos. But perhaps the same may be applied to our adult adolescents of the "Permanent Revolution".
The Pleasure of Power.
This indoctrination program in the Humanities has been running for over five decades. I saw it first hand beginning to peak in 1998-2000.
It functions as a toolbox to develop personal power through carefully crafted language tools. What makes it so attractive is that while you are building your power base, you also cultivate the sense of moral superiority. It's a delicious recipe.
You are placing yourself as the ultimate patron over the weak and the powerless. Your education becomes a weapon of justice. If you allow free debate and open inquiry, it reduces your power. The pleasure of power tickles the base of the brain stem.
You betcha. Just watch the nasty cunts on The View toss constant offhand sneering insults at the lumpen proletariat in flyover country. Their braindead audience - whom security would stop from ever trying to approach The Holy Stage - laughs along, nodding their hollow skulls at who collectively smarter they all are.
The Jacobins were big fans of feelings and sensibility. Robespierre said: "To love justice and equality the people need no great effort of virtue; it is sufficient that they love themselves".
Self-righteousness tends to be a fine guide for poor judgment, or... “People are never more sincere than when they assume their own moral superiority.” — Thomas Sowell
Idea for a book: 'Great Sayings Debunked'. Maybe it has already been written - perhaps by a critical theorist? (My personal bête noire is "Cogito Ergo Sum")
It can be summed up simply as tribal warfare, motivated by tribal instincts surfacing inappropriately in the modern world. And it's not entirely irrational.
https://penbroke.substack.com/p/leftist-behavior-is-just-ancient
Queers for Palestine don't care that their views are internally inconsistent because they are marching to support Muslims who reliably vote left wing, and thus through this kind of tribal alliance they tactically increase their own power. They don't plan to actually go to Gaza, and they calculate (subconsciously) that the liberal regime they have in place is strong enough that allying with Muslims won't result in any gays they know actually getting stoned down the road from themselves, so it's pure win - more power for the left, no downsides.
This IS rational, whether we like it or not, it's just "rational" over a short timeframe. But the leftists don't plan on letting their allies actually gain control. At worst, they think, the Muslims will be allowed to stone their own gays, but not the sort of white gays found with blue hair studying humanities at Harvard. Not people like themselves. That would certainly still yield an investigation and crushing response. And there's nothing inconsistent about them wanting that.
it might be worth letting the Muslims take over just to see them destroy the Left.
That's exactly what happened in Iran when the current crew took power. The Islamists and Marxists both considered each other to useful idiots. When the Shah was toppled, the Muslims struck first and killed all of their leftist "allies".
That is also exactly what will happen in the UK and elsewhere if the Muslims attain power.
is there really any question as to who would come out on top?
The issue is never the issue, the issue is always the _outcome_ of the revolution.
Beautifully put. One of the greatest tricks Marx pulled was to be the 19th century L. Ron Hubbard. He created a New Religion out of whole cloth - and in Marx's case, one of the facets of the trick was to claim that his new belief structure (in complete denial of observable reality) is that it is NOT a religion at all, which implies belief in the unseen, but is a betterer, smarterer, more cleverer way of "truly seeing" reality.
Lorenzo does a fine job here.
The collective is a forced involution where the end result is, you will be a happy monkey!
I call the modern left 'the elastic ideology,' because it stretches to expand almost any position that is tactically advantageous in the short-term. At its deepest level, it wants to radically dismantle traditional structures and remake society but it will often pretend to embrace folk wisdom or morality or commonsense criminal justice notions... until it gains enough power. Then it will dispense with these notions, which it really despises. This approach is fundamentally unethical and intellectually dishonest, but these aren't constraints for believers who openly disdain the concepts of virtue and ethics and truth and logic.
The closer the left moves towards radical success, the more the mask slips. The fact that our progressives have become so wild-eyed and unreasonable in the estimation of so many centrist voters isn't just a mark of their own disconnection and delusion. It's also an indication that their cultural project is, in many ways, succeeding. If they only could've permanently diluted the concepts of gender and sex roles they would've been within sight of the finish line, I think. We should all fear the hell that would result.
https://jmpolemic.substack.com/p/the-elastic-ideology
So if proving inconsistencies or arguing are not going to win, and will merely put you in a weaker position, with the left in control of culture—how exactly do you defeat them? What method do you use? I agree with your conclusion but I’d like to see the next step. There are a lot of ideas out there, none of which seems actually doable without society turning into something truly ugly and therefore defeating the whole point.
Yes, it is a genuine conundrum. My ideas on this are still developing, but there is a lot of things that can be done without being nastily illiberal. Force non-profits to wind up after a certain time (i.e. extend the law against perpetuities). Deny any taxpayer funding to activist scholarship. Abolish arts and research grants—replace the latter with block grants to STEM that require at least 30% of funding to go on replication studies. Require nurse, teacher and journalist training to go back to an intern/apprenticeship model. That sort of measure.
For the details of change to fall into place, a new animating force needs to arise to drive it. It has to come from the innate desire and will of 'most of the people' or 'the strongest (elite) of the people.' Right now the will of the people is either flaccid or actively destructive.
I think what's needed can happen, I'm just not yet seeing what form it'll take. Posts like yours are good for the process and thanks for that.
It's more about social control than anything else.
You see the same thing with Communism in China - you might have noticed their 'communism' has a lot of capitalistic qualities, yet they still embrace it. The reason is that it forces people to express their loyalty publicly, and gives them an opportunity to see who is insufficiently loyal to 'the cause'.
These people (like academics, religious folks, free-thinkers, etc.) pose a threat to those at the top because they aren't willing to blindly follow the herd. Thus, they can be singled out for further indoctrination until they break or are eliminated altogether, not unlike how people questioning DEI policies are sent for further 'sensitivity training' or 'cancelled'.
I know that there is a shared reality independent of individual consciousness, because if you get in a car accident the insurance carriers determine who pays by who is at fault. If there was no objective reality, it would always be 50/50. Metaphysics is easy.
LMAO
Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guildmaster and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, that each time ended, either in the revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.
I don't remember reading about patrician and plebians being at odds in Rome or Athens. Everyone had their place and some people worked hard to better themselves.
The Lord and Serf were tied together with bonds stronger than steel. Serfs stayed in one place and worked the land, while the Lord provided them with protection. The guildmaster and Journeyman worked together as well, some for better, some for worse. But without the guildmaster, the journeyman wouldn't have a career. Guilds were how one got jobs.
Imagine a blue haired freak telling a survivor of Iranian independence, should it ever happen, that freeing them is wrong. It's gaslighting of the worst kind.
I'm sorry but this is almost pathologically uninsightful and deceptive; it describes at best a tiny subset of the groups in question.
I could torch this whole essay but I'll just focus on one bit: while there is a "Queers for Palestine" group, there is no organization iirc called "Feminists for Hamas". That's fake and you completely made it up. The former can be quite radical because they're young and foolish generally, but there's no philosophical inconsistency in having ordinary liberal politics towards Israel and also having ordinary liberal feminist sympathies/LGBT-tolerant views. This is a good reason why you shouldn't form your personal convictions in reaction to the most radical people you encounter online, and why you *especially* shouldn't publish bad essays elevating and mischaracterizing their ideology - this whole thing is just a human centipede of ignorance.
Okay one other thing: overzealous leftists aren't inspired in any meaningful way by Marx and Engels. They barely read anything at all! This is all just totally out-of-touch navel-gazing.
I never said there was a group called Feminists for Hamas/Hezbollah/Iran, I linked to people who declare themselves feminists and support Hams/Hezbollah/Iran.
And repeated patterns are repeated patterns. Yes, a lot of these useful idiots have never read Marx or Engels. But the people who developed Critical Theory absolutely have. Such Critical Theory then leads to all its spin offs—Critical Race Theory, Queer Theory, Critical Pedagogy, etc. That then generates the ideological tropes and moralised status games we can repeatedly see.
Lots of people have never read Marcuse, or his essay on repressive tolerance, but you absolutely see his ideas re-packaged to justify politically selective censorship.
This is why you see such repeated patterns. From DEI generating commissars (DEI officers, etc), to genderwoo and Critical Social Justice generating Lysenkoism in science publishing to conformity in the arts and literary scene generating Zhadonovism. Talk to any ex-Soviets, they will enlighten you with the patterns they recognise.
The same foundational ideas have the same consequences.
https://www.lorenzofromoz.net/p/left-progressivisms-three-foundational
No less an academic luminary than Judith Butler called Hamas part of the global left. Another left luminary, Slavoj Zizek, doubted the atrocities of October 7. These people are not ignorant online trolls but the 21st century equivalent of the intellectuals who supported Hitler (Heidegger) and Stalin (Duranty). In other words, they follow the discursive logic of Marxism and Nazism: if you are against the Enemy (capitalism and liberal democracy), you are a friend and an ally.
Okay but these are not "Queers for Palestine"-types. Ostensibly this essay is trying to find a philosophical origin point for silly rank-and-file leftists, who are just overzealous 19-year-olds who don't read. When a piece fails to be explanatory about a broad group of people, it can't just evolve into some amorphous attack on some washed up leftist who no one listens to anymore. There's also a deceptive conflation of people with ordinary liberal views on Middle East foreign policy (who simultaneously hold socially tolerant views on women and LGBT people, which is no contradiction at all), and campus left revolutionary cosplayer-types. It also doesn't seem like "the issue is revolution" really comes up at all in this analysis. This is all just very lazily put together for cheap approval from people who see easy punching bags being attacked and it would be received the same way no matter what the substance of the piece was.
I don’t know what “liberal views on Middle East foreign policy” means, but it certainly does not mean support for Hamas. The essay was correct in identifying a major contradiction between support for Islamism abroad and ostensible support for feminism at home. It has now become a major feature of the activist discourse on campuses. Whatever you call these students, they are not idiots who can’t read. The red-green alliance is real, and is getting some electoral victories in the UK. So, it’s quite right to ask how one can be in favor of Islamism AND in favor of women’s and gay rights. Either the latter are universal or they are not.
If you don't know what "ordinary liberal views on Middle East foreign policy" means, then I have... questions, since I don't know how someone can be ignorant of the foreign policy leanings of an entire side of the political spectrum while also having confident views on anything else political. This is a microcosm of my main objection to this piece and others in the same genre, just a total detachment from what actually matters or happens in the world.
Also, I didn't say they *can't* read, I said they *don't*. Like, that's just descriptively true - you think these kids are reading Marx and Engels? Seriously? The idiots who say "Hamas are actually decolonizing Israel!" are not serious thinkers nor are they inspired by them. You have to take their professed radicalism and part of the foolishness of youth, not some ideology whose philosophical underpinnings need to be meticulously studied.
I'll close by just saying I teach at a college and pretty much my entire close circle is leftists/left-leaning; might I suggest that I have a better idea of the kind of profile of person this article is attempting to describe?
First, I am a university professor, so I do know what my students are reading. Second, ideologies are perpetuated by cultural osmosis rather than by deep study of certain texts. Millions of people are Christians without reading the entire Bible; millions are Muslims without reading the Quran: and millions are Marxists without reading Das Kapital. The logic of an ideology that propels people into radicalism is more important than their individual philosophies, such as they are. And liberal views on the Middle East mean that you oppose Islamism and every regime and organization that supports it. If you support Hamas, Iran or Hezbollah, you cannot be a liberal.
It's all socialism in disguise. Feminism, climate, lgbtq, pc, all of it.
That overstates, if only because a lot of the folk involved simply do not focus very much on economic issues.
So much bulverism that can be simply refuted by the fact that there is no internal inconsistency. You can support the rights of gay people and also support Palestine, because you don’t need to agree with people to care about their interests.
It’s as simple as that. You’d be able to think more clearly if you tried to extend more charity to your ideological opponents.
You cannot support gay rights and support Hamas or the Islamic Regime that both kill homosexuals. You cannot support women’s rights and support Hamas or the Islamic Regime that religiously demand and enforce the subordination of women. The contradiction is obvious.
If such folk condemned Hamas or the Islamic Regime, then that would be different, but they don’t.
It depends what you mean by ‘support’, but the only sense of the word which would create an inconsistency is ‘endorse everything they say, think or do’ and I don’t really that’s a common position at all with respect to Hamas or Iran on the left (or anywhere else).
You can very easily support gay rights and also Hamas in its war with Israel, specifically. That doesn’t mean you should, but there’s no inconsistency.
The premise of this article is just you making a fairly rudimentary logical error.
People ‘can’ do all sorts of inconsistent things. But if you define yourself by an identity group and then support an organisation or state that makes its business to suppress, particularly brutally and murderously that identity group, then yes, there is an obvious contradiction there.
This could as well be a reply to my original comment. It’s like you literally did not register my reply.
As I JUST said, there’s no contradiction in supporting Hamas in an entirely different endeavour, unrelated to gay rights. If you disagree, please make your argument explicitly instead of just repeating the conclusion. Why would that be inconsistent? What is the contradiction?
So really its more like homos and the delusional who hate Israel?
Supporting Hamas and Iran means supporting people who kill gays. That is flagrantly against gay rights.
Supporting Hamas and Iran means supporting people who actively force women to be second rank citizens subordinated to men. That is a flagrant denial of feminism.
If you identity as Queer or feminist you can only support Hamas or the Islamic Republic by utterly subordinating that support over what happens to gay folk in Palestine and Iran, what happens to women in Palestine and Iran.
In which case, you are applying the politics of the Friend/Enemy distinction is precisely the way I say in my post.
No, you can just disagree with someone on one thing and nonetheless support them in another.
Like how I disagree with you about this, but if you were wrongfully imprisoned by the government I would support you in that. It wouldn’t imply endorsement of your every view or act, but simply entail supporting you *in that specific context*, whatever I might think of anything else about you, because you’re on the right side of that specific issue.
And if people were saying ‘don’t you see the contradiction in supporting him when he believes [one of the many things I infer you to believe that I’m vehemently opposed to], I’d tell them they should raise their level of thinking beyond blind tribal allegiance and into the realm of principled reason.
So… that.
I've seen vast amounts of support for the Palestinians from all sorts of leftist lunatics, and not a single peep from them in criticism of anything. As far as I can tell, these clown actually endorse everything they say, think or do.
If you could point me to some examples of Gays for Palestine and similar outfits criticising the execution of gay people and the stoning of women in Palestine and Iran, that'd be great.
That’s a failure of your engagement with your ideological opponents- and a genuinely staggering one for someone speaking so confidently about a topic they clearly haven’t attempted to learn about at all, given how quick this google search was- not a failure of your ideological opponents themselves.
Here’s maybe the most prominent ‘queers for Palestine’ figure (he literally wrote the book), doing a whole interview dedicated to discussing this very objection:
https://www.them.us/story/lgbtq-solidarity-palestine-saed-atshan
Here’s an article prominently featured on the website of one of the most prominent ‘queers for Palestine’ style organisations (from 2013 by the way), discussing why they believe this is a misleading trope and Israeli oppression of Palestinian people is the more important issue to address:
https://alqaws.org/articles/Eight-questions-Palestinian-queers-are-tired-of-hearing?category_id=0
Here’s an opinion piece along similar lines featured in the major left-leaning newspaper the Guardian less than one year ago:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/jun/25/queer-palestinian-identity-gaza-rights
You may not agree with the responses- I think they vary considerably in their honesty and quality of argument myself- but the idea that this ostensible contradiction has not been addressed by the activists you criticise reveals nothing but your own fairly blinding lack of familiarity with the subject you speak so confidently about.
LoL. What a load of nonsense.
The idiot who ypu say wrote the book on the subject also said "That being said, homophobia is not unique to Palestinian society. It exists in most parts of the world". Of course, in most parts of the world gays aren't killed by the state.
Just a worthless steaming pile of deflection.
You write confidently and aggressively about something of which you are both ignorant and delusional.
The Gays for Palestine are overwhelmingly supportive of the Hamas reign of terror in Gaza, and they're still chickens for KFC. To suggest otherwise is simply stupid.