Thanks, Steve! The assertion of moral purity knows no bounds. One can demand nearly anything from another human being--their goods, their labor, their freedom, even their life--once that person has been deemed privileged and the one who demands has claimed innocent victimhood. It is a scourge of our time.
As per my comment it is perhaps why in the EU it is the former Warsaw Pact countries that are most sceptical about the "woke" virtue signalling etc. of the "western" european elites.
Watched an interview today with a notable psychologist who stated that regardless of how they present themselves, the average adult is now only about 8 years old intellectually. Knowing what I'm up against, I no longer let what they say get to me.
Feminism is about freedom for women to demand rights, material goods, services and emotional support while being exempt from the obligation to work to achieve these items, share them with others or take responsibility for anything in their lives. It rests on the idea that women by definition are morally pure unlike those around them. It is of course evidence of the opposite in the women who adopt the feminist position. As the old saying goes, Feminism exists to make unattractive, unpleasant and unqualified women equal or superior to those who made their way based on some form of merit!
I have a friend at my Church. An elderly widow. With a remarkable history. As a young woman she went to Czechoslovakia. To link up with other young people of the denomination behind the Iron curtain. Long story short she ended up staying and marrying Czech. Her memories of life there, mainly after the collapse of Dubcek's Prague Spring, are a window on what the determined application of equality means everyday life. For instance how she used to visit a cousin of her husband who was imprisoned for two years for selling cabbages from her small garden, to her friends of course because everyone knew any sign of enterprise of any smallest sort was "economic crime". How all weddings (only at the town hall not in Churches of course)had to be exactly the same to prevent any conspicuous bourgeois showing off. Her husband bribed the official officiating to have a friend play the violin rather than the state mandated music. Her mother in law was punished by a specially low pension and having tenants billeted with her in her apartment because she had been bourgeois (her husband had been a well known Conductor before WW2) despite her husband being a left leaning opponent of the Nazis who was shot by them. While her son had to go and spend two years labouring on a farm in addition to his national service before he could study music because he was tainted by his bourgeois past, he was a baby when his father was killed. There are many such tales that illustrate to me the sheer detail of the oppression required to achieve that equality the Communists wanted. Like the more famous Stasi files in East Germany every Check citizen had a file on them in what is now a huge archive of the minute and humdrum that had to be monitored so closely to ensure no one deviated from the virtuous course to "the eternal classless society". Eventually she and her husband were allowed to leave, in the early 1980s. Ironically only a few years before the collapse of the Wall and the Velvet Revolution. Sadly she was widowed after only a few years. Of course Communist Czechoslovakia was also feminist (though no so much; it only had male national service) as well as not capitalist and bourgeois but the feature that really has consistently startled me is the reach into every persons life required to ensure no one got above being equal. Having "done" 1984 at School, and thought the chilling control to eventually break Winston Smith so he loved Big Brother was exaggeration, my friend's reminiscences have made me reevaluate that view. It turns out that pursuing "equality" requires the secret police to watch every person and aspect of life.
While I agree with much of your take, I am a lefty. This is seemingly impossible to you.
Understand that your complaints, complaints I share, are aimed at the FAR left, the Progressives, not old school Liberals like me, who occupy a larger band of the blue vote than the far left cry bully crowd. They are just *very* loud and good at grabbing the spotlight. And shaming centrists into either compliance or silence.
Have you given any thought to how Silicon Valley tycoons whose innovations and capitalism essentially built 21st century technology, are the epitome of capitalists while being very left wing? Apparently not.
I would bet that blue voter (leftist) has a lower correlation to "socialist" than red voter correlates to Jan 6th apologist.
It is not surprising to me at all that the super wealthy convert to socialism. They don't need capitalism anymore, and their position at the top of the world is cemented when they pull up the ladder by pushing for socialism. I wrote about this and published it in the following video. View at your own risk, I'm told that it causes debilitating confusion and rage in some leftists:
Steve, your whole article is loaded with very condescending dismissals, so coming from that you have no leg to stand on. Right out of the gate you say the left "unanimously" applauded an "airhead," far more condescending language than anything I said. And absurdly false. It demonstrates your error, that you think the left is a monolith.
My point is that for all your pontificating about the "left," you actually know very little about us. Most leftists don't applaud statements like Eilish's. Almost every single lefty claim you made in this article does *not* apply to me or to many like me.
You clearly have been confused about the left for a long time because you conflate the whole left with the loudmouth Progressive far left. It's a narrow slice but unfortunately they have a megaphone and a bully mindset to silence dissenters.
You should ask yourself how a leftist like me can agree with you in most of your complaints, and ask yourself how many others like me there are who feel the "left" has been largely hijacked by crazies over the last 40 years. How is it a blue-voting lefty like Bill Maher has spent as much time (or more) as talk show host vehemently criticizing PC culture and wokeness as he spends criticizing the GOP.
The super wealthy "convert" to socialism?? Which of the innovators in the IT space who created the 21st century tech that drives our lives switched from voting red to voting blue after they got rich? Any?
I'm thinking about the big names and drawing a blank. The ones who vote blue have always voted blue as far as anyone knows.
Your erroneous thinking is also revealed every time you conflate Liberalism with socialism. While the far left do regularly tout socialism the moderates do not.
Some of what you say is true in my experience. People on the left keep looking for things to be offended by but I've seen it from the right as well. However, although I've been abused by the left the only people who ever cancelled me were from the right. So I think you are talking in generalities. Also, and most people are unaware of this, your conflating of capitalism with freedom is part of a conspiracy that goes back to the late 1890's (and although I'm not even a conspiracy theorist it is extremely well documented) where wealthy businessmen saw any form of government intervention as being against their best interests so they fought safe working laws, insurance for widows whose husbands were killed on the job, and the employment of children in mines and unsafe factories, etc. So they fought back with capitalism = freedom but given the sh#t working conditions, people weren't buying it. That was disappointing so they enlisted academics, newspaper editors, and any means possible both overtly and covertly to convince people (the same methods that the right claim the left are using today). It didn't work and they had setbacks, including a major government inquiry. I won't go into great detail but it basically went like this. They licked their wounds, regrouped and tried again in the 1920's, now with access to radio. It started to get some momentum. New groups of wealthy businessmen carried the flame (conservative and libertarian). They carried on through the 1930's, more money spread around, rewrote Mill's book, cherry picking the parts they liked and distributed it widely, pushing for laissez faire capitalism. Another government enquiry sat them on their arses for a while. Then they expanded to capitalism=freedom=christianity, enlisted the aid of churches, along came television, popular books, think tanks, ronald reagan (who became their main tool) and popular books stressing independance and hard work based on a fictional idea of the American west. And here we are today. The message was so successful that your article expresses most of what they were aiming for and it is so buried in the American psyche now that it seems like it's your own 'sensible' ideas. It was probably the most successful brainwashing experiment in human history. So now they have succeeded under Trump and the oligarchs. But the irony is that what they really preach is, as Malcom X said "socialism for the rich, [and] rugged individualism for the poor'. Now I don't expect you to believe any of it but if you have some introspection you might start to ask where the ideas come from and who benefits. Just saying.
“poverty could be solved if only billionaires would give their money to the poor” is perhaps the greatest of all macroeconomic fallacies...and not just on the Left.
'To illustrate the fallacy, imagine oneself as a billionaire who indulged yourself with every last thing you could think of....mansions, yachts, football clubs, art collections etc etc etc....the whole lot.
Two truths emerge from this What If fantasy but they are truths that can be somewhat counter-intuitive. The first truth is that no human being, however greedy, can possibly personally consume billions of dollars. [What the billionaire’s wealth does give them is a large degree of control over other people’s livelihoods. It does this both directly plus indirectly in the way they choose to invest their huge capital assets.]
The second truth is that every cent of the billionaire’s wealth, whatever they decide to do with it, is, at the end of multiple lengthy transactional chains, someone else’s livelihood. This applies to every piece of hardware and services consumed by them, whether directly or indirectly. And the greater part of those myriad transactions will be the salaries of countless thousands of employees in various manufacturing and service industries. All the way from relatively well-healed professionals, to office workers, factory workers, shopkeepers, waiters and cleaners. Even the millions paid for the private art collection will release capital that will end in someone else’s pocket, somewhere in the world; ultimately millions of pockets.' https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/globalism-vs-national-conservatism
Those are good points to raise against simplistic anti-billionairism. The billionaire is still only a person, and can't really "consume" more than what will fit into his own belly, i.e. no more than a person of middling means. The rest of his "consumption" goes into the transaction chains that give other people their livelihoods.
But what about the effects of trying to park and preserve that wealth? If the billionaire "invests" by buying up farmland or real estate, or existing business operations, then he functions as a rentier, living off his strategic control of something valuable that he prevents others from using except that they pay him a cut and manage it according to his rules. This might actually stifle the production of valuable things overall, while creating chains of dependency that crush liberty for everyone.
Agreed on most points. It's ironic that many European feminists, who (presumably) hate the male gender ("Malekind?") also encourage the flooding of Europe with hordes of male savages, thus skewing the gender ratio toward males. Additionally, it turns out that the migrants selectively abort female fetuses.
If you are on social media or read any published news, you will have seen each and every one of the behaviors that I’ve described. And it matters not one bit what the moderate people appear to do when they run out and support the lefties who scream for dominance and control. They vote in lockstep.
David Benatar supports ethical veganism and wrote The Second Sexism. Michael Huemer is also an ethical vegan and is an anarcho capitalist who wrote a whole book against identity politics.
Man, this area of the men’s rights movement that try to link it with a broad conservative, ‘anti leftist’, movement was always a detriment to the movement as a whole, as it alianates more nuanced left wing people who care about men’s rights while attracting a bunch of conservatives who don’t care about men’s rights and want to make it about their causes (like population decline or ‘making men masculine again). (And I say this as mostly a pro free market guy.)
This article is a great example of why I don’t care a lot about Brule. This is, at best, tenuesly related to men’s rights and saying the same things I can read on any mainstream conservative website.
I would agree with all of what you have posted here except for the anti-vegan position. I would say I am a conservative libertarian, right of Trump on many issues. Of course, I voted for Trump. Animal rights is not a Leftist position; it is a philosophical position that has been hijacked by radical Leftists, mostly feminists. Its best expression is from the late Tom Regan, an ethicist whose work was based on the Enlightenment philosophy of Kant. The idea of individual rights and freedoms took form with the Enlightenment and, in the 20th century, thanks to Regan and other thinkers, was correctly applied to some non-human mammals (such as chimpanzees and dolphins, but also cows and pigs) using the concept of "a subject of a life." Most animal rights activists have never heard of Regan or Kant.
"Subject-of-a-life describes a being that has a sense of self, beliefs, desires, and an emotional life, making it an individual with inherent value. Tom Regan defined it as having consciousness, a sense of the future, and an independent welfare that is logically separate from its usefulness to others. According to this view, such beings have a right to moral consideration and should not be treated as mere resources."
You are a "subject of a life"; so am I, and all reading this -- and so are certain animals who have these traits. They are not equal to us in every respect (obviously), but it's also true that they possess "negative rights", which include the right to life and liberty - even if they have been bred in captivity for instrumental use. They should not be caged and bred, and used in this cruel way.
Advocating for liberty is hardly a Leftist position. Quite the opposite. The question is only to whom shall this ethic properly apply? That is the crux of it. Only to human beings, or to all sentient beings? If peaceful, intelligent, emotional aliens landed on Earth, would it be okay to enslave them simply because they're not human? Is intelligence alone the criterion on which to grant rights and freedoms? What about humans of lesser intelligence? That alone cannot be the sole criterion. It is sentience that should be the basis for it, and homo sapiens are not the only animals on Earth that are sentient.
You don't even need to agree with these philosophical arguments to agree that animal cruelty is wrong. Those industries claim to be "humane", but they're not. That is a lie, to whitewash themselves. We are not equal to animals (though technically speaking, homo sapiens are part of the Animal Kingdom); we are in a superior position of power, and with that comes moral responsibility. Being pro-animal does not mean you are anti-human. It just means not being in favour of animal cruelty. If dogs and cats, whom we have as pets, were put in these conditions, there would be outrage, but cows, pigs, and chickens have intelligence and emotions, and they can feel pain too, like dogs or cats. They suffer needlessly in hellish conditions.
I will concede that many animal rights activists are Leftists -- but that is only because that movement was hijacked by them and turned into an "intersectional feminist" circus within the last 15 years or so. Originally, it was not like that. If anything, conservatives should be trying to liberate a good ethic -- animal rights -- from these lunatics, many of whom care nothing for animals but want to use the movement's moral capital to advance neo-Marxist race and gender ideologies. I can tell you stories about that. I was in the movement for a few years, but left after seeing what happened.
The activists you're referring to in the article, who disrupt restaurants, are, I believe, called DXE (direct action everywhere), but their confrontational tactics are by no means representative of all vegans or animal rights activists, most of whom simply vote with their wallets and choose not to participate in animal cruelty by factory farms and slaughterhouses. Yes, it is cruel; see the movie on YouTube called Earthlings (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8gqwpfEcBjI) if you doubt it.
Ironically, DXE was the target of race hustlers within the AR movement, accusing activists of being racist! See "How the Red Guard Destroyed My Family" by one of the founders of DXE: https://www.directactioneverywhere.com/dxe-in-the-news/2015-12-27-how-the-red-guards-destroyed-my-family. It's a good article, quite similar to your own, actually. He calls his experience being the target of the race-baiters the "Politics of Punishment". Unfortunately, he edited the original version of this article, which referred to the race-baiting, and concludes with some Gandhian platitudes. I guess he did that because he had become a target of Leftists.
Homo sapiens are omnivores, tending towards fruitarianism like other great apes to whom we're closely related, genetically. Those apes eat a 95% plant-based diet and 5% small animals, carrion, or insects. The point is that as a species, are we easily able to eat a tasty plant-based diet. I am living proof of it. Every conceivable recipe can be plant-based, and there has never been a greater assortment of plant-based meats and dairy products, some of which taste identical to animal-based products (but cost a bit more). See the movie Forks Over Knives. Or just make your own. But I don't think you can do it without being a good cook and having a food processor. I learned to cook when I chose this years ago.
Some people just choose fewer animal products for ethics or health, which is fine too. Vegans I know are certainly not "starving." I am overweight if anything, but I am at less risk of cancer and heart disease due to my diet than other middle-aged men. That's how I got into it about 20 years ago, for health reasons, but after that, becoming aware of the animal cruelty involved in meat and dairy production, I could see the ethical argument for it and being in grad school for philosophy decided to read Regan's books, such as Empty Cages.
I don't consider this a "morally pure" position -- but it is a moral position, and morality is part of our make-up. I am a Christian with free will to choose good or evil, sin or salvation. The Rev. Dr Andrew Lindsay has written a number of excellent books and articles arguing that this moral position is consistent with that faith. I believe he is correct. I did a slideshow presentation on this topic in seminary. Not many were persuaded, but I still think the presentation was good. Lindsay covers all the bases; most Christians are unaware that the Bible has numerous passages it against animal cruelty. See this lecture: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J3uIWDiPIto.
My basic moral position on this is that to inflict animal suffering when you don't have to is unnecessary. I won't stop all animal suffering with my diet (clearly), but I don't have to pay for it. I don't have to be part of it. I grow a garden and eat quite healthily. Yes, such activism can be taken too far, and is by some, such as extreme misanthropes or overly judgmental people, who take animal rights activism to extremes. I am not in favour of that. PETA for example has some rather questionable tactics and views. But that does not invalidate the moral argument behind animal rights or veganism, which I believe is essentially correct and philosophically and theologically defensible. It's sad to me that Leftists took over that movement and ruined it. But that does not invalidate the original ethical position. Also, keep in mind that most Leftists are meat-eaters and many of them mock animal rights as "racist."
Kill Lefties dead! 👏 Ha! Pretty sure it was Hayek who said the "if all are equal none are free" phrase but 🤷 eh. To my chagrin I just can not read Solzenitzzzzzz...🙈 Interestingly: Hanna Fry covers some ground on research on Women in Power; the Left & Woke Women go together FABULOUSLY. That Left, liberal, educated, septum ring klatch. They "feel" that information suppression is justified for group dynamics & that debate & argument are too... harsh. Oh, and tests are too hard 🤷
Lefties like Billy Eilish seem to adhere to the childish belief that billionaires have scads of spare cash just lying around the house, stashed in cupboards and coming out of their couch cushions. They believe that money could simply be scooped up and delivered to poor people.
In fact, their billions are overwhelmingly invested in productive assets. If these assets were to be transferred to the government, the best thing the government could do with them is nothing. Leave them alone, and let the billionaires with a track record of success continue to manage them. Because any change would very likely reduce the value of the assets, which in turn would reduce the value of everyone's pensions and cost untold millions of jobs. Touching the billionaires' assets would make everyone poorer, except the politicians and bureaucrats who get themselves involved in the redistribution schemes.
Billionaires aren't billionaires because they have money. They are billionaires because they make everyone associated with them better off - including their share holders, input suppliers, employees, lenders,, and most of all the purchasers of their products. The second they don't make everyone better off, those people stop associating with the billionaire and improve their lives by associating with someone else. That's how freedom works to make everyone better off.
Billionaires' wealth is nearly all in securities, stocks and bonds. Any transfer of securities just means somebody else owns a claim on said assets, but the transfer does not affect how those productive assets are deployed. It is management and boards who decide that, not passive owners with less-than-controlling stakes.
If Zuckerberg gave away every share of his stocks but stayed on as CEO, he would have considerable control over social media while not even being close to being a billionaire. If the opposite happened, he held no executive role or board seat but owned a multi-billion non-controlling interest in the stock, he would have only soft power to *maybe* influence the company's decisions.
Money does not equal power the way people think it does. Actual official power that resides in positions of authority is far greater.
Billie Eye Lash is smarter than you, I am sad for you boomercon.
And not a Commie, a National Socialist, actual Nazis encouraged a free market, but also demanded corporations pay decent wages so ordinary people could afford cars and vacations, and he seized the property Jewish oligarchs hoarded from criminal usury and returned it to the long suffering German people. This allowed National Socialist Germany to avoid the boom bust cycle of fully unregulated capitalism as was seen in the Grear Depression of the 1930s seen in the U.S. and the rest of Europe.
Mr. Raven believes that the *National Socialist German Workers Party* was a free-market embracing libertarian gang. OMG. No, they were typical progressive lefties of the day, including embracing with quite a degree of zeal the implementation of eugenics. For the record, they did not believe in the free market, they believed in nationalizing some industries and using government coercion of various kinds to direct private businesses to further their agenda. This did not in fact allow Germany to avoid boom and bust cycles, which unregulated capitalism isn't prone to anyway. These are just Marxist and Keynesian fallacies.
They became under Hitler right wing fascists. Socialism was popular in germany at the time so hitler co-opted the party, retaining the name 'socialist' which is why so many people think they were on the left of politics. Couldn't be further from the truth. Hitler 'disappeared the key socialists in the party.
Hitler was not "right wing" in any respect. He was a national socialist who nationalized some industries. Do right-wingers create state-owned companies like Volkswagen? You have been duped. Fascists are left-wing ideologues. Instead of using an inefficient state apparatus to pursue socialist goals, they co-opt private businesses with bribes and the threat of coercion to pursue the state's objectives. OMG it is easy to fool people.
you might want to look into that a bit more and yes it is easy to fool many people. look at MAGA. Mussolini's fascist Italy, nationalized significant portions of industry and yes he was a right winger. Hitlers "National Socialist German Worker's Party" is the ultimate example of a fascist party. but hey don't take my word for it, there's this thing called 'Google'. Maybe don't throw around the word 'fool' so easily. Introspection may not be your forte.
There is *nothing* right wing about fascism. Right-wingers are free marketers, free speechers, and free associationists. They are small government types. Fascists are inherently left-wing, government-knows-best types. You have no clue what even the most basic fundamentals of political philosophy are.
You funny and obviously a victim/product of the U.S. education system. Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party are universally considered to be on the far-right of the political spectrum by historians and political scientists. Nazism is a form of fascism, an ideology fundamentally opposed to left-wing movements such as communism, socialism, and democracy. I mean seriously this isn’t hard to understand unless your political ideology prevents you from seeing reality. Now you are just becoming tedious and you could find this stuff out for yourself.
It is possible to be a left-winger AND an antifeminist at the same time. Opposing feminism doesn't mandate you oppose common sense left-wing ideas like labour unions, welfare programs and public education.
Also, opposing feminism includes opposing traditional gynocentirsm, chivalry and so on... things the right wing typically promotes rather than opposes.
Remember Ernest Belfort Bax, a socialist AND antifeminist. One does not preclude the other.
Thanks, Steve! The assertion of moral purity knows no bounds. One can demand nearly anything from another human being--their goods, their labor, their freedom, even their life--once that person has been deemed privileged and the one who demands has claimed innocent victimhood. It is a scourge of our time.
As per my comment it is perhaps why in the EU it is the former Warsaw Pact countries that are most sceptical about the "woke" virtue signalling etc. of the "western" european elites.
Watched an interview today with a notable psychologist who stated that regardless of how they present themselves, the average adult is now only about 8 years old intellectually. Knowing what I'm up against, I no longer let what they say get to me.
Okay, who smashed my marshmallow? Fuck you!
This is not to argue against the criticism of the methods, but the underlining issue they are responding to is real.
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"Multiverse Journal - Index Number 2223:, 14th July 2025, State's Organized Planned Disempowerment of the American Citizen" https://stevenwork.substack.com/p/multiverse-journal-index-number-2223 https://archive.ph/jqINM
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And the source of their confusion and failures, ..
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"Multiverse Journal - Index Number 2227:, 27th September 2025, The Ongoing Worldwide Rape of Mind and Soul to fully realize Homo Umbrans" https://stevenwork.substack.com/p/multiverse-journal-index-number-2227 https://archive.ph/i6i5W
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So, how does Traditional Catholicism Theology wrap Justice and Truth and Right-Ordering to this entirety?, ..
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"Multiverse Journal - Index Number 2230: 16th November 2025, Catholic Apologetics: On the Threefold Unions, Crisis of the Modern World" https://stevenwork.substack.com/p/multiverse-journal-index-number-2230 https://archive.ph/yCCXt
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God Bless., Steve
Brilliant analysis, as always. Just remember, when leftists say, "Give your money away," they mean, "Give your money to me."
Feminism is about freedom for women to demand rights, material goods, services and emotional support while being exempt from the obligation to work to achieve these items, share them with others or take responsibility for anything in their lives. It rests on the idea that women by definition are morally pure unlike those around them. It is of course evidence of the opposite in the women who adopt the feminist position. As the old saying goes, Feminism exists to make unattractive, unpleasant and unqualified women equal or superior to those who made their way based on some form of merit!
Exactly
Feminism is not about equality
It is an ideology based on nothing but hatred of men and boys and is really all about power and SPECIAL STATUS FOR WOMEN IN ALL THINGS
Feminism is the largest hate movement the world has ever seen
It's right up there with Islam in that regard!
I have a friend at my Church. An elderly widow. With a remarkable history. As a young woman she went to Czechoslovakia. To link up with other young people of the denomination behind the Iron curtain. Long story short she ended up staying and marrying Czech. Her memories of life there, mainly after the collapse of Dubcek's Prague Spring, are a window on what the determined application of equality means everyday life. For instance how she used to visit a cousin of her husband who was imprisoned for two years for selling cabbages from her small garden, to her friends of course because everyone knew any sign of enterprise of any smallest sort was "economic crime". How all weddings (only at the town hall not in Churches of course)had to be exactly the same to prevent any conspicuous bourgeois showing off. Her husband bribed the official officiating to have a friend play the violin rather than the state mandated music. Her mother in law was punished by a specially low pension and having tenants billeted with her in her apartment because she had been bourgeois (her husband had been a well known Conductor before WW2) despite her husband being a left leaning opponent of the Nazis who was shot by them. While her son had to go and spend two years labouring on a farm in addition to his national service before he could study music because he was tainted by his bourgeois past, he was a baby when his father was killed. There are many such tales that illustrate to me the sheer detail of the oppression required to achieve that equality the Communists wanted. Like the more famous Stasi files in East Germany every Check citizen had a file on them in what is now a huge archive of the minute and humdrum that had to be monitored so closely to ensure no one deviated from the virtuous course to "the eternal classless society". Eventually she and her husband were allowed to leave, in the early 1980s. Ironically only a few years before the collapse of the Wall and the Velvet Revolution. Sadly she was widowed after only a few years. Of course Communist Czechoslovakia was also feminist (though no so much; it only had male national service) as well as not capitalist and bourgeois but the feature that really has consistently startled me is the reach into every persons life required to ensure no one got above being equal. Having "done" 1984 at School, and thought the chilling control to eventually break Winston Smith so he loved Big Brother was exaggeration, my friend's reminiscences have made me reevaluate that view. It turns out that pursuing "equality" requires the secret police to watch every person and aspect of life.
You are absolutely right. Equality requires total control over everyone's lives, and that is the authoritarianism of the left.
Brilliant insights. Thanks, Steve!
Thanks for the encouragement Geoff!
While I agree with much of your take, I am a lefty. This is seemingly impossible to you.
Understand that your complaints, complaints I share, are aimed at the FAR left, the Progressives, not old school Liberals like me, who occupy a larger band of the blue vote than the far left cry bully crowd. They are just *very* loud and good at grabbing the spotlight. And shaming centrists into either compliance or silence.
Have you given any thought to how Silicon Valley tycoons whose innovations and capitalism essentially built 21st century technology, are the epitome of capitalists while being very left wing? Apparently not.
I would bet that blue voter (leftist) has a lower correlation to "socialist" than red voter correlates to Jan 6th apologist.
I'll ignore your condescending dismissal.
It is not surprising to me at all that the super wealthy convert to socialism. They don't need capitalism anymore, and their position at the top of the world is cemented when they pull up the ladder by pushing for socialism. I wrote about this and published it in the following video. View at your own risk, I'm told that it causes debilitating confusion and rage in some leftists:
https://youtube.com/live/Omz5hDOpX2I?feature=share
Steve, your whole article is loaded with very condescending dismissals, so coming from that you have no leg to stand on. Right out of the gate you say the left "unanimously" applauded an "airhead," far more condescending language than anything I said. And absurdly false. It demonstrates your error, that you think the left is a monolith.
My point is that for all your pontificating about the "left," you actually know very little about us. Most leftists don't applaud statements like Eilish's. Almost every single lefty claim you made in this article does *not* apply to me or to many like me.
You clearly have been confused about the left for a long time because you conflate the whole left with the loudmouth Progressive far left. It's a narrow slice but unfortunately they have a megaphone and a bully mindset to silence dissenters.
You should ask yourself how a leftist like me can agree with you in most of your complaints, and ask yourself how many others like me there are who feel the "left" has been largely hijacked by crazies over the last 40 years. How is it a blue-voting lefty like Bill Maher has spent as much time (or more) as talk show host vehemently criticizing PC culture and wokeness as he spends criticizing the GOP.
The super wealthy "convert" to socialism?? Which of the innovators in the IT space who created the 21st century tech that drives our lives switched from voting red to voting blue after they got rich? Any?
I'm thinking about the big names and drawing a blank. The ones who vote blue have always voted blue as far as anyone knows.
Your erroneous thinking is also revealed every time you conflate Liberalism with socialism. While the far left do regularly tout socialism the moderates do not.
Lefties are overwhelmingly hypocrites, and Silicon Valley lefties are no exception.
Childish statement. Clearly you have a stereotype of "leftie" in your head. Now do right winger and ask if they are overwhelmingly hypocrites.
Some of what you say is true in my experience. People on the left keep looking for things to be offended by but I've seen it from the right as well. However, although I've been abused by the left the only people who ever cancelled me were from the right. So I think you are talking in generalities. Also, and most people are unaware of this, your conflating of capitalism with freedom is part of a conspiracy that goes back to the late 1890's (and although I'm not even a conspiracy theorist it is extremely well documented) where wealthy businessmen saw any form of government intervention as being against their best interests so they fought safe working laws, insurance for widows whose husbands were killed on the job, and the employment of children in mines and unsafe factories, etc. So they fought back with capitalism = freedom but given the sh#t working conditions, people weren't buying it. That was disappointing so they enlisted academics, newspaper editors, and any means possible both overtly and covertly to convince people (the same methods that the right claim the left are using today). It didn't work and they had setbacks, including a major government inquiry. I won't go into great detail but it basically went like this. They licked their wounds, regrouped and tried again in the 1920's, now with access to radio. It started to get some momentum. New groups of wealthy businessmen carried the flame (conservative and libertarian). They carried on through the 1930's, more money spread around, rewrote Mill's book, cherry picking the parts they liked and distributed it widely, pushing for laissez faire capitalism. Another government enquiry sat them on their arses for a while. Then they expanded to capitalism=freedom=christianity, enlisted the aid of churches, along came television, popular books, think tanks, ronald reagan (who became their main tool) and popular books stressing independance and hard work based on a fictional idea of the American west. And here we are today. The message was so successful that your article expresses most of what they were aiming for and it is so buried in the American psyche now that it seems like it's your own 'sensible' ideas. It was probably the most successful brainwashing experiment in human history. So now they have succeeded under Trump and the oligarchs. But the irony is that what they really preach is, as Malcom X said "socialism for the rich, [and] rugged individualism for the poor'. Now I don't expect you to believe any of it but if you have some introspection you might start to ask where the ideas come from and who benefits. Just saying.
“poverty could be solved if only billionaires would give their money to the poor” is perhaps the greatest of all macroeconomic fallacies...and not just on the Left.
'To illustrate the fallacy, imagine oneself as a billionaire who indulged yourself with every last thing you could think of....mansions, yachts, football clubs, art collections etc etc etc....the whole lot.
Two truths emerge from this What If fantasy but they are truths that can be somewhat counter-intuitive. The first truth is that no human being, however greedy, can possibly personally consume billions of dollars. [What the billionaire’s wealth does give them is a large degree of control over other people’s livelihoods. It does this both directly plus indirectly in the way they choose to invest their huge capital assets.]
The second truth is that every cent of the billionaire’s wealth, whatever they decide to do with it, is, at the end of multiple lengthy transactional chains, someone else’s livelihood. This applies to every piece of hardware and services consumed by them, whether directly or indirectly. And the greater part of those myriad transactions will be the salaries of countless thousands of employees in various manufacturing and service industries. All the way from relatively well-healed professionals, to office workers, factory workers, shopkeepers, waiters and cleaners. Even the millions paid for the private art collection will release capital that will end in someone else’s pocket, somewhere in the world; ultimately millions of pockets.' https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/globalism-vs-national-conservatism
Those are good points to raise against simplistic anti-billionairism. The billionaire is still only a person, and can't really "consume" more than what will fit into his own belly, i.e. no more than a person of middling means. The rest of his "consumption" goes into the transaction chains that give other people their livelihoods.
But what about the effects of trying to park and preserve that wealth? If the billionaire "invests" by buying up farmland or real estate, or existing business operations, then he functions as a rentier, living off his strategic control of something valuable that he prevents others from using except that they pay him a cut and manage it according to his rules. This might actually stifle the production of valuable things overall, while creating chains of dependency that crush liberty for everyone.
Right. Nobody actually hordes billions of dollars. That kind of wealth has to be parked in assets, whether gold bars or Treasury bonds or whatever.
When the assets are purchased the billions flow back into the economy.
Agreed on most points. It's ironic that many European feminists, who (presumably) hate the male gender ("Malekind?") also encourage the flooding of Europe with hordes of male savages, thus skewing the gender ratio toward males. Additionally, it turns out that the migrants selectively abort female fetuses.
https://x.com/Basil_TGMD/status/1975864910535131589?s=20
Regarding vegans, the one's I've known personally are not obnoxious about it; the behavior you describe appears to be from fringe elements.
If you are on social media or read any published news, you will have seen each and every one of the behaviors that I’ve described. And it matters not one bit what the moderate people appear to do when they run out and support the lefties who scream for dominance and control. They vote in lockstep.
David Benatar supports ethical veganism and wrote The Second Sexism. Michael Huemer is also an ethical vegan and is an anarcho capitalist who wrote a whole book against identity politics.
Man, this area of the men’s rights movement that try to link it with a broad conservative, ‘anti leftist’, movement was always a detriment to the movement as a whole, as it alianates more nuanced left wing people who care about men’s rights while attracting a bunch of conservatives who don’t care about men’s rights and want to make it about their causes (like population decline or ‘making men masculine again). (And I say this as mostly a pro free market guy.)
This article is a great example of why I don’t care a lot about Brule. This is, at best, tenuesly related to men’s rights and saying the same things I can read on any mainstream conservative website.
I would agree with all of what you have posted here except for the anti-vegan position. I would say I am a conservative libertarian, right of Trump on many issues. Of course, I voted for Trump. Animal rights is not a Leftist position; it is a philosophical position that has been hijacked by radical Leftists, mostly feminists. Its best expression is from the late Tom Regan, an ethicist whose work was based on the Enlightenment philosophy of Kant. The idea of individual rights and freedoms took form with the Enlightenment and, in the 20th century, thanks to Regan and other thinkers, was correctly applied to some non-human mammals (such as chimpanzees and dolphins, but also cows and pigs) using the concept of "a subject of a life." Most animal rights activists have never heard of Regan or Kant.
"Subject-of-a-life describes a being that has a sense of self, beliefs, desires, and an emotional life, making it an individual with inherent value. Tom Regan defined it as having consciousness, a sense of the future, and an independent welfare that is logically separate from its usefulness to others. According to this view, such beings have a right to moral consideration and should not be treated as mere resources."
You are a "subject of a life"; so am I, and all reading this -- and so are certain animals who have these traits. They are not equal to us in every respect (obviously), but it's also true that they possess "negative rights", which include the right to life and liberty - even if they have been bred in captivity for instrumental use. They should not be caged and bred, and used in this cruel way.
Advocating for liberty is hardly a Leftist position. Quite the opposite. The question is only to whom shall this ethic properly apply? That is the crux of it. Only to human beings, or to all sentient beings? If peaceful, intelligent, emotional aliens landed on Earth, would it be okay to enslave them simply because they're not human? Is intelligence alone the criterion on which to grant rights and freedoms? What about humans of lesser intelligence? That alone cannot be the sole criterion. It is sentience that should be the basis for it, and homo sapiens are not the only animals on Earth that are sentient.
You don't even need to agree with these philosophical arguments to agree that animal cruelty is wrong. Those industries claim to be "humane", but they're not. That is a lie, to whitewash themselves. We are not equal to animals (though technically speaking, homo sapiens are part of the Animal Kingdom); we are in a superior position of power, and with that comes moral responsibility. Being pro-animal does not mean you are anti-human. It just means not being in favour of animal cruelty. If dogs and cats, whom we have as pets, were put in these conditions, there would be outrage, but cows, pigs, and chickens have intelligence and emotions, and they can feel pain too, like dogs or cats. They suffer needlessly in hellish conditions.
I will concede that many animal rights activists are Leftists -- but that is only because that movement was hijacked by them and turned into an "intersectional feminist" circus within the last 15 years or so. Originally, it was not like that. If anything, conservatives should be trying to liberate a good ethic -- animal rights -- from these lunatics, many of whom care nothing for animals but want to use the movement's moral capital to advance neo-Marxist race and gender ideologies. I can tell you stories about that. I was in the movement for a few years, but left after seeing what happened.
The activists you're referring to in the article, who disrupt restaurants, are, I believe, called DXE (direct action everywhere), but their confrontational tactics are by no means representative of all vegans or animal rights activists, most of whom simply vote with their wallets and choose not to participate in animal cruelty by factory farms and slaughterhouses. Yes, it is cruel; see the movie on YouTube called Earthlings (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8gqwpfEcBjI) if you doubt it.
Ironically, DXE was the target of race hustlers within the AR movement, accusing activists of being racist! See "How the Red Guard Destroyed My Family" by one of the founders of DXE: https://www.directactioneverywhere.com/dxe-in-the-news/2015-12-27-how-the-red-guards-destroyed-my-family. It's a good article, quite similar to your own, actually. He calls his experience being the target of the race-baiters the "Politics of Punishment". Unfortunately, he edited the original version of this article, which referred to the race-baiting, and concludes with some Gandhian platitudes. I guess he did that because he had become a target of Leftists.
Homo sapiens are omnivores, tending towards fruitarianism like other great apes to whom we're closely related, genetically. Those apes eat a 95% plant-based diet and 5% small animals, carrion, or insects. The point is that as a species, are we easily able to eat a tasty plant-based diet. I am living proof of it. Every conceivable recipe can be plant-based, and there has never been a greater assortment of plant-based meats and dairy products, some of which taste identical to animal-based products (but cost a bit more). See the movie Forks Over Knives. Or just make your own. But I don't think you can do it without being a good cook and having a food processor. I learned to cook when I chose this years ago.
Some people just choose fewer animal products for ethics or health, which is fine too. Vegans I know are certainly not "starving." I am overweight if anything, but I am at less risk of cancer and heart disease due to my diet than other middle-aged men. That's how I got into it about 20 years ago, for health reasons, but after that, becoming aware of the animal cruelty involved in meat and dairy production, I could see the ethical argument for it and being in grad school for philosophy decided to read Regan's books, such as Empty Cages.
I don't consider this a "morally pure" position -- but it is a moral position, and morality is part of our make-up. I am a Christian with free will to choose good or evil, sin or salvation. The Rev. Dr Andrew Lindsay has written a number of excellent books and articles arguing that this moral position is consistent with that faith. I believe he is correct. I did a slideshow presentation on this topic in seminary. Not many were persuaded, but I still think the presentation was good. Lindsay covers all the bases; most Christians are unaware that the Bible has numerous passages it against animal cruelty. See this lecture: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J3uIWDiPIto.
My basic moral position on this is that to inflict animal suffering when you don't have to is unnecessary. I won't stop all animal suffering with my diet (clearly), but I don't have to pay for it. I don't have to be part of it. I grow a garden and eat quite healthily. Yes, such activism can be taken too far, and is by some, such as extreme misanthropes or overly judgmental people, who take animal rights activism to extremes. I am not in favour of that. PETA for example has some rather questionable tactics and views. But that does not invalidate the moral argument behind animal rights or veganism, which I believe is essentially correct and philosophically and theologically defensible. It's sad to me that Leftists took over that movement and ruined it. But that does not invalidate the original ethical position. Also, keep in mind that most Leftists are meat-eaters and many of them mock animal rights as "racist."
Kill Lefties dead! 👏 Ha! Pretty sure it was Hayek who said the "if all are equal none are free" phrase but 🤷 eh. To my chagrin I just can not read Solzenitzzzzzz...🙈 Interestingly: Hanna Fry covers some ground on research on Women in Power; the Left & Woke Women go together FABULOUSLY. That Left, liberal, educated, septum ring klatch. They "feel" that information suppression is justified for group dynamics & that debate & argument are too... harsh. Oh, and tests are too hard 🤷
Lefties like Billy Eilish seem to adhere to the childish belief that billionaires have scads of spare cash just lying around the house, stashed in cupboards and coming out of their couch cushions. They believe that money could simply be scooped up and delivered to poor people.
In fact, their billions are overwhelmingly invested in productive assets. If these assets were to be transferred to the government, the best thing the government could do with them is nothing. Leave them alone, and let the billionaires with a track record of success continue to manage them. Because any change would very likely reduce the value of the assets, which in turn would reduce the value of everyone's pensions and cost untold millions of jobs. Touching the billionaires' assets would make everyone poorer, except the politicians and bureaucrats who get themselves involved in the redistribution schemes.
Billionaires aren't billionaires because they have money. They are billionaires because they make everyone associated with them better off - including their share holders, input suppliers, employees, lenders,, and most of all the purchasers of their products. The second they don't make everyone better off, those people stop associating with the billionaire and improve their lives by associating with someone else. That's how freedom works to make everyone better off.
Billionaires' wealth is nearly all in securities, stocks and bonds. Any transfer of securities just means somebody else owns a claim on said assets, but the transfer does not affect how those productive assets are deployed. It is management and boards who decide that, not passive owners with less-than-controlling stakes.
If Zuckerberg gave away every share of his stocks but stayed on as CEO, he would have considerable control over social media while not even being close to being a billionaire. If the opposite happened, he held no executive role or board seat but owned a multi-billion non-controlling interest in the stock, he would have only soft power to *maybe* influence the company's decisions.
Money does not equal power the way people think it does. Actual official power that resides in positions of authority is far greater.
Billie Eye Lash is smarter than you, I am sad for you boomercon.
And not a Commie, a National Socialist, actual Nazis encouraged a free market, but also demanded corporations pay decent wages so ordinary people could afford cars and vacations, and he seized the property Jewish oligarchs hoarded from criminal usury and returned it to the long suffering German people. This allowed National Socialist Germany to avoid the boom bust cycle of fully unregulated capitalism as was seen in the Grear Depression of the 1930s seen in the U.S. and the rest of Europe.
Ok, Nazi.
Thank-you for your self-dentification. You unwittingly add weight to my thesis.
Mr. Raven believes that the *National Socialist German Workers Party* was a free-market embracing libertarian gang. OMG. No, they were typical progressive lefties of the day, including embracing with quite a degree of zeal the implementation of eugenics. For the record, they did not believe in the free market, they believed in nationalizing some industries and using government coercion of various kinds to direct private businesses to further their agenda. This did not in fact allow Germany to avoid boom and bust cycles, which unregulated capitalism isn't prone to anyway. These are just Marxist and Keynesian fallacies.
They became under Hitler right wing fascists. Socialism was popular in germany at the time so hitler co-opted the party, retaining the name 'socialist' which is why so many people think they were on the left of politics. Couldn't be further from the truth. Hitler 'disappeared the key socialists in the party.
Hitler was not "right wing" in any respect. He was a national socialist who nationalized some industries. Do right-wingers create state-owned companies like Volkswagen? You have been duped. Fascists are left-wing ideologues. Instead of using an inefficient state apparatus to pursue socialist goals, they co-opt private businesses with bribes and the threat of coercion to pursue the state's objectives. OMG it is easy to fool people.
you might want to look into that a bit more and yes it is easy to fool many people. look at MAGA. Mussolini's fascist Italy, nationalized significant portions of industry and yes he was a right winger. Hitlers "National Socialist German Worker's Party" is the ultimate example of a fascist party. but hey don't take my word for it, there's this thing called 'Google'. Maybe don't throw around the word 'fool' so easily. Introspection may not be your forte.
There is *nothing* right wing about fascism. Right-wingers are free marketers, free speechers, and free associationists. They are small government types. Fascists are inherently left-wing, government-knows-best types. You have no clue what even the most basic fundamentals of political philosophy are.
You funny and obviously a victim/product of the U.S. education system. Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party are universally considered to be on the far-right of the political spectrum by historians and political scientists. Nazism is a form of fascism, an ideology fundamentally opposed to left-wing movements such as communism, socialism, and democracy. I mean seriously this isn’t hard to understand unless your political ideology prevents you from seeing reality. Now you are just becoming tedious and you could find this stuff out for yourself.
Are socialists not "leftists?"
Yes, why do you ask?
She’s an awful, obnoxious role model
It is possible to be a left-winger AND an antifeminist at the same time. Opposing feminism doesn't mandate you oppose common sense left-wing ideas like labour unions, welfare programs and public education.
Also, opposing feminism includes opposing traditional gynocentirsm, chivalry and so on... things the right wing typically promotes rather than opposes.
Remember Ernest Belfort Bax, a socialist AND antifeminist. One does not preclude the other.