Journal of Other Forum Analysis (Volume II, Issue 1)

[StandingOvation]

Do you think B-Dubs regrets purging PoliEra? He agrees with them on most things and compared to the rest of Era they were sane.

Is that the dumbest thing he's done?

Edit: more Word Salad for Benji to eat:

I don't think we can achieve succinctness in strategy without actually figuring out our demands first. Part of the issue you correctly point to is the nebulousness and relational context of political terms like "left," which is why I'm always saying I'm confused by people including people like me in the in-fighting because "in-fighting" implies that I am in the same political headspace as most of the people on Era. I'm not. And frankly I don't know why that delineation engenders resentment; my side is small. You'd do better to be honest and ignore my side than try to lie to me to say "we're all in this together."

We're not all in this together.

Many people on the "left" want the continuance of capitalism but just want select minorities- namely queer folks and standard ethnic minorities lucky enough to be born in the West- to be beneficiaries of its upward flow of wealth and relative stability, but they never say that and instead just continue to engage in shallow idpol and contrarianism to Republicans as the baseline of their politics because aesthetics and culture war drivel are how we've been indoctrinated to engage in politics.

We've never actually had a true reckoning to define what system we want, what our relationship should be to a system, what are the basic principles that should be upheld, none of that. We've resigned ourselves to different flavors of capitalism and insist having a different flavor means it's not fundamentally the same dessert. Liberals just keep grabbing me by the shoulder and pulling me in for a group photo without my consent, and when I say "Yo, I'm not part of this family reunion," they get mad at me and keep saying I'm the one ruining the picture! Like I didn't ask to be included in the first place, but you keep talking about the left!

We should define terms! We should discuss and debate about meaning and context! We should increase our vocabulary! We should educate ourselves about the conditions of the world, past and present! We should literally seek to gain as much knowledge as possible instead of resting our laurels on vague assumptions and ill-defined beliefs and movements, because when you can define the problem then you can define the solution. It's why for example I always tell people to define "human nature" when they're resigning themselves to capitalist realism, to get them to actually think critically about why they are reflexively assuming that all humans actually think like capitalists and are thus assuming this system is all biologically-driven.

So before we even decide what the plan is, we need to decide not only what the problems are by how we individually align ourselves in the pursuit of solutions to those problems. You can't plan for a problem you don't know about. This vagueness and lack of clarity on what "leftism" is is part of the problem and is why liberals are always playing defense against Republican framing. They don't actually know what they believe, or they do but are scared to say it because their beliefs are shit and they don't want to engage in the work of deconstructing shitty beliefs to attain better ones.

I can tell you for a fact he still thinks he's in the right.