Talks with Leftists

~ Clarissa

I talked to two lefties with green hair and many piercings yesterday. One is German and another Spanish. They have overcome the 2008 resentments and united in their dislike of Ukraine.

“We love you, Clarissa,” they chimed in unison, “but this is horrible for our countries.”

I’m a sucker for patriotic arguments, so I was willing to listen.

“What specifically do you mean?” I asked.

“Don’t you see? We will now have to invest a lot of money into defense.”

“That’s good, though, right?” I said. “Defense is good.”

“But we’ll have to take that money out of the social programs.”

“Which social programs?” I asked. “Weren’t we just talking about how austerity cuts have been in place for 15 years?”

“We have really important social programs, and we don’t want to see them cut because now we have to buy weapons.”

“Which programs?” I persisted.

“Well, we need a lot of programs for refugees. We have a lot of refugees.”

This is the most bizarre mentality. The US needs to pay for their defense and Ukrainians have to welcome conquest so that Western Europeans can move in more migrants. I was outside a total of three minutes yesterday and still managed to get harassed, so my interest in the idea of more refugees was nil. I expressed that sentiment, and one of my interlocutors was visibly annoyed.

“Please be honest,” he said, “would you be as upset if these men were blond and light-skinned?”

The left has lost even the capacity to argue its case. Its response to absolutely any argument is calling people racists. The leftists I talked about are academics, highly educated people. They have impoverished themselves intellectually on purpose because otherwise their belief system can’t be maintained. Back when I was a leftist, we had ideas and not just name-calling. Leftism has degenerated badly in the past decade and a half.

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Published by Clarissa

34 thoughts on “Talks with Leftists”

  1. “We have a lot of refugees”

    You could go hardcore and ask them: “How many Ukrainian lives are you willing to sacrifice per migrant? One to one? Two to one? What’s your over-under?”

    But then they might answer… and that would be pretty discouraging.

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  2. It’s hilarious to me that part of your observations about Europe sound like a Fox news propaganda segment. 🙂 I wonder if that is partially because you will see what you subconsciously expect, and that is why you chose a hotel in a exceptionally bad area?
    I have lived in urban areas in Switzerland, Germany and Netherlands with high migrant population for about 25 years and have been harassed by migrant men maybe twice, once by a migrant woman, and a few more times by mentally disturbed local men. I feel really safe here most of the time. I have felt very unsafe in Boston though.

    I have also been thinking whether I know anyone who might argue we should not increase defense spending because that might take away money from refugee programs. This seems an absurd position. Refugee programs must be a lot cheaper than what they are planning to spend for the military. I have a few very old-school leftist, no-borders, anti-capitalist friends  (all older than 60 for some reason). I find it hard to imagine even they would say that.

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    1. “It’s hilarious to me”

      It’s hilarious that you sound like a caricature of an out of touch liberal who’s entire attitude is ‘it doesn’t affect me so it can’t be a problem’…

      “in a exceptionally bad area?”

      Sucks to be a German in an exceptionally bad area… But who cares about those losers?

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      1. When I was 11, I thought I was causing the harassment. I thought I was somehow provoking it, that I was dirty, broken. I didn’t tell anybody about it because I felt guilty. 37 years later, and it’s still my fault. I chose the wrong hotel. Even though I’m forced by my university to choose the cheapest option, it’s still somehow my fault.

        It’s always my responsibility not to get harassed. It’s never the responsibility of the swine who harass me to not do it.

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        1. “never the responsibility of the swine who harass me”

          MENA (sensu largo) migrants in Western Europe are the new White Man’s Burden. The way liberals talk about them is more condescending than Kipling. They don’t see them as full human beings with their own agendas but as malleable albeit stubborn pieces of clay to be shaped (sometime…. somehow… in the future) into good burgers.

          The fact that MENA migration to Europe has failed spectacularly everywhere it’s been tried does not discourage them.

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          1. Migrant men stand in lieu of the children they decided not to have. The mothering function clamors for a release, and this is the object to which they apply it. This is totally a reaction of a besotted mommy who refuses to believe anything bad about her little darling, even when the little darling is very much an adult.

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            1. “Migrant men stand in lieu of the children they decided not to have”

              Americans have pets instead of children and West Europeans have migrants…

              I keep feeling in the middle of an absurdist dystopian low tragicomedy.

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    2. I’m sincerely glad you aren’t getting harassed but it would be nice to get some sympathy when I am. It’s kind of sad that I’m getting blamed for being harassed. What’s next, asking me if I dress provocatively?

      The first time I was harassed I was 11. After that and until I moved to the US, I was harassed daily until the age of 27, often in very aggressive ways. I was beaten, grabbed, dragged, insulted, and threatened. This happened in Ukraine, a heavily immigrant area of Montreal, and Latin America. And every time I heard that either I caused it in some way or I’m inventing it. Strangely, I always hear this from women. Men might suggest that I’m exaggerating the discomfort this causes me but not outright that I’m asking for it.

      This is making me very sad. What, I can’t even mention aloud that I’m getting harassed because it’s ideologically uncomfortable?

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        1. That’s why I despise #MeToo. The very real harassment that tortures so many women doesn’t exist for them. We are politically inconvenient. We are supposed to take it for team lib and shut the fuck up. Even just simple human compassion evaporates when the sacred figure of a migrant dude is mentioned. They are always the victim in any situation.

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        2. That’s just it. I don’t think they even watch Fox. It’s just that it was on a list of talking points a couple months ago, and unless some countermanding order arrives, it’ll be stuck there till the end of time.

          Ellul describes this in amazing detail. This is one of those bizarre details that the less introspective will sincerely believe, and reflexively spit out given the correct stimuli, until they die. Fox News could cease to exist and they’d still say it. It’s locked in. And it never even occurs to them that they’ve been programmed. Never “why did I just say that super weird thing?” Just saw trigger keyword—> printout reads “Dumb righties watch Fox News” accompanied by a feeling of contempt with a little reinforcing back-puff of self-superiority. Complete mental reflex, bypassing analysis, reason, critical faculties, and the urge to relate as one human to another. Fox News viewers aren’t truly *people* you know.

          It’s self-reinforcing ideological armor.

          When you read the theory, it seems so dry and… like, really, can this possibly work?

          But then you see it in action and yes, it works *just like that*. And that was before propaganda organs had the internet and everybody was carrying a terminal around in their hand all day. Goebbels would have pissed himself with joy over that kind of capability.

          (despair for humanity goes here)

          Zinemin, if you’re at all interested, Ellul also points out that small social groups (before internet, so he’s talking about the in-person kind) such as family, church, sports teams, quilting groups, the garden club, book group, the bowling league, bicycling club, jogging group, or even a regular square-dance or bridge meetup, so long as they are not political or ideologically captured by propaganda already, are all protective against being programmed by the mass media propaganda machine. AND they’re great for your mental and emotional health. Highly recommended!

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    2. Yes, academia and the media have been rotten for far more than a decade and a half. Mind you, I am so old that I can remember when the nightly PBS news could be trusted to be relatively balanced ;-D

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        1. My grandfather used to tune into the BBC on shortwave radio since he didn’t trust a world of the local news. If anything these days there are more options if you are willing to look for them.

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      2. I remember listening with my parents to the NPR news in the car. Even then, they’d roll their eyes a bit at the liberal bias, but you could still count on them to basically report the major news stories of the day instead of trying to completely mindf*ck you.

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  4. I am sorry this is happening to you, I really am.

    But with all the attacks on Europe from your government at the moment, I am a bit sensitive to the constant insinuating by right-wing Americans that Europes city are horrible places overrun by aggressive migrants. They are not, even if your conference organizers were apparently not able to recommend a hotel in a normal area to you. I guess I can imagine an area in Munich where it might be like that at night, close to the main station, so there are very rare places where it is indeed uncomfortable to walk at night as a woman. Sure, that is a problem and I am sorry that it happened to you.

    I am not an out of touch liberal, Cliff, that is funny, sorry. How can I be out of touch if I lived in cities with lots of migrants, used public transport daily, walked in city centers at night etc.? I did not live in posh areas, I live in completely normal neighbourhoods. I admit have been afraid sometimes of foreign looking men but I never get harassed and none of my female friends are complaining of daily harassment, it is an issue that just never comes up in my normal life in the cities that I know well.

    It has nothing to do with ideology. I am not ideological about migration in the least. I would prefer not to see head scarves or even burkas in public, I am annoyed about migrants in the train not respecting local rules (this includes Ukrainian refugees) and generelly I feel like the limit of migration to Switzerland has been reached.

    I am just saying that this weird narrative that European cities are inhospitable to women and need to be saved by extreme right wing parties who are the only ones telling the truth is wrong. The idea we’re letting foreign men mistreat us out of ideological reason is laughable. We are not insane. The women in cities are not voting for right wing parties because they mostly feel safe here, not because they are so blinded by ideology.

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    1. Here’s a serious question. A man lives in Somalia / Afghanistan / Iraq / Turkey, etc. He treats women like dirt. We can agree that these countries aren’t bastions of feminism, right? Women are subhuman there.

      So this man comes to Germany. Will he somehow magically transform at the border and start perceiving women differently? Is there some sort of magical air in Germany that effectuates this profound transformation? In millions of men? Simultaneously? How do you explain this phenomenon that you seem to believe to exist?

      To me it sounds likelier that he’s exactly the same person, acting exactly like he always did because why not?

      As for why you don’t hear from your friends that they get harassed, honestly, what do you expect after your reaction to my story? I wouldn’t share with you either. You told me I was asking for it. Is it shocking that women don’t want to hear it and avoid the topic with you? When a person shares a painful, humiliating experience, and this is the reaction, why would she share?

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      1. Except they don’t behave exactly the same at home. At home, if he behaves this way toward *the wrong female*, then that female’s father or brother might exact revenge.

        In the West, though, all females are whores, and nobody’s going to take revenge, so it’s a permanent whore-party. They’re *worse* than they are at home, because of the attitudes they bring from home.

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        1. I don’t understand how people explain to themselves why people from a country where women are genitally mutilated wouldn’t see women exactly the same way after being physically moved someplace else. Where does the magical change occur? Is it enough to move them a mile away? Ten miles? How does geography wreak this transformation?

          I sincerely and respectfully would be fascinated to hear what the theory here is. If Haiti is terrible, how is moving Haitians to Ohio not turn Ohio into Haiti?

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            1. The same people who keep talking about the horrible oppression of women in Afghanistan want to inflict men from Afghanistan on all of us. But who is oppressing those women? It’s a mystery. It can’t possibly be the Afghani men. No, sirree. Never. It’s the patriarchy that somehow exists without any human agents.

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      2. And again, “this is happening” to me. It’s somehow magically happening with no human agency. I’m to blame, the organizers are to blame, but these men are never to blame. Not a word about how they are doing something terrible. They are the aggressors. They are wrong. No, nothing.

        It truly is an absolute mystery why other women wouldn’t mention getting harassed.

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  5. “Migrant men stand in lieu of the children they decided not to have. The mothering function clamors for a release, and this is the object to which they apply it.“

    I think the time has come for a serious analysis of how to explain the rise of women in so many areas of life from which they had until now been substantially excluded – in particular, academia, politics, public administration, the judiciary and higher management – with the concomitant feminisation of entire areas of professional activities, and the terrible things that everyone is seeing happening in Western Europe.

    I am a man, but I’m not blind and I’m not stupid. Ursula von der Leyen is in her second five-year stint as president of the EU Commission, Christine Lagarde is at the ECB; Angela Merkel was at the helm of the EU’s most influential member state from 2005 to 2021: that’s a long time, and it’s not going well in Germany or in the EU generally.

    The police force in the UK is headed by a woman: again, it’s not going well. Ever since women have been given [yes, given, NOT earned] positions of authority in fire brigades, police departments, boards of directors, things have gone downhill. Only a few months ago, during the pro-Pal disruptions on campus, one had to go through the most ludicrous spectacle of realising that three of the US’s most prestigious and worst affected universities – Harvard, Columbia and Penn – were all headed by women: incompetent, deluded and crass, all of them.

    Just this morning anti-Israel protesters – many of them soi-disant Jews – stormed Trump Tower in New York: look at the photos and you’ll see that they are mostly women. Why? Do they know what role is reserved for them in Palestinian society? Again, many of them are Jewish: do they know what an overwhelming majority of Palestinians think should happen to them?

    Commenter zinemin writes: “The women in cities are not voting for right wing parties because they mostly feel safe here, not because they are so blinded by ideology.“

    Now, I do not know where zinemin lives, and I can only be happy that nothing untoward has ever happened to her in all of the many dodgy areas in which she claims to have lived, but women living in areas with large volumes of immigrants and refugees do NOT feel safe: you only have to ask them.

    If women do not vote for right-wing parties, it is not because “they mostly feel safe here“, but rather because White Western women are virtue-signallers by nature, want to feel good by doing good and to be seen as doing good. That is, at least until they are bitten by reality, as anybody can see who will listen to Ana Kasparian, a lifelong card-carrying member of the women’s liberal brigade until she was sexually assaulted by a homeless man, which left her physically bruised but, more importantly, forced her to face the reality which she had until then denied.

    As methylethyl points out, men – not just migrant men, all men – from Islamic countries come from societies in which women are basically invisible, they are not considered free agents with any kind of bodily autonomy: they are supposed to stay in the home, and if and when they are outside, they are invariably chaperoned. Any woman who is outside her home without a male “guardian” of some sort – husband father brother cousin – is invariably considered a whore and, as such, a fair target.

    Until women in the West realise that their freedom is not a given to be taken for granted, Europe will continue to move in the direction of resurgent chaos and lack of accountability: what happened to the North Africans who sexually assaulted those women in Cologne on New Year’s Eve in 2015-16? The police didn’t even want to take their statements!!! The same thing happened last year in Milan: same people, same scenario. Have you heard of any convictions? I surely haven’t. Women wake up!

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