Why am I bothering asking that?
CW: 
I don’t think baby leftist is meant to be an insult. Everyone was once a baby leftist, especially the many of us who started out with the default liberal worldview, slid to social democracy, before finally reading Marx or being radicalized by experience.
Vaushites aren’t baby leftists, they’re still on Tutorial Island confused how to progress into the main game.
Yeah, perhaps “baby leftist” was too kind a term.
Really Vaushites are just straight up Libs, heck even that may be too kind a word.
libs, blindly grasping at radical aesthetic to appropriate
Many Vaushites are baby leftists. How many of us worshipped the ground Chomsky walked on? Or even thought Obama was a Social Democrat? Or thought Bernie was an actual Socialist rather than materially compromised to the point of inaction? It takes time and disillusionment, and a lot of Vaushites will fall away as they recognise the contradictions in his arguments. Some back to lib or chud-land, but many into leftism proper.
True, but Obama and Bernie also aren’t cringe ass drama streamer pedophiles. I’m kinda sympathetic to people who fall for actually charismatic hucksters. If you fall for a huckster who’s as charismatic as your creepy uncle who not invited to thanksgiving anymore… I’m sorry there’s like something deeply wrong with you that I don’t think is truly changeable and if you realize the error of you ways perhaps your fate shouldn’t be redemption but like a cabin in a very isolated place.
Yeah baby leftist isn’t derogatory at all - it’s someone who is just starting their good faith leftist learning pathway
I was a lib, too, once. They’re not hopeless. Or at least some of them aren’t.
There’s a difference between a bog standard lib and a diehard vaushite
Idk, I can imagine that some Vaushites are baby leftists who will eventually grow past Vaush and go further left. I remember when I first got into leftist ideas, I thought Contrapoints was super radical.
Samsies. I voted for Obummer the first time, I used to help with democrat campaigns, I even supported the NATO invasion of Libya until it became clear that the propagand was not what was happening on the ground. It took a lot of getting proverbially punched in the head by the realities of capitalism and the US to finally break me out of it.
They don’t even read current news, they vibe about headlines.
I wouldn’t even call them leftists if they post on r/
.Leftist
Vaush-posting
:-/
If at the beginning of the war, Ukraine had literally sent in execution death squad to liquidate Russians for no reason, an porportatrate response is justified. That is how international law works. What wouldn’t be is an collective punishment.
There’s just so much wrong with this, from top to bottom. I don’t think the problem is “no history more than two years old” so much as it is “pure propaganda that insulates you from any narrative that doesn’t reinforce the domestic agenda”. Clearly, they do know about the Ukraine War. They do know, vaguely, how it started. And they do entirely blame this on the Russian military, so its all good. Add in this incredibly cool view of international law that states “I can’t commit a war crime if you committed one first”.
Even then, if the US was allied with Palestine rather than Israel, this person would have ingested a completely different view of history. Combine that with a baseline disgust for semitic and slavic peoples across the West, and I can’t help but suspect an underlying sentiment of “two primitive lesser races genocide themselves is good for us Masters” pervades the entire discourse. We get to talk cavalierly about these wars because, in the end, no matter who loses its the Western Hegemony that get to come in and pick up the pieces and claim sovereignty over everyone else.
Every civil war is, at its heart, another Yugoslavia. And they’re just clearing out a new frontier for us to colonize later.
This is why I say NATO leftist because your average liberal makes it clear that they think they’re on the left but draw the line at anything related to Marxism. Socialism to them is Social Democracy and that’s as good as it gets. Good example of this are Bernie Bros who argued that all government programs were socialism and that Communism was an extreme form of it that needed to be avoided.
A NATO leftist doesn’t just think they’re on the left. They’re convinced that they’re revolutionaries. They’ll say they support Marx, use memes from leftypol, claim they’re against US imperialism, maybe even have a hammer and sickle sticker somewhere. All while doing anything in their power to maintain the status quo and bash anything that advocates for more than social democracy.
They exist outside of NATO countries too, but it tends to be NATO countries where you find the most of them.
I want to add that it’s also not just advocating for the status quo. They think the US and its NATO allies are a net benefit to the world and will defend them while pushing Social Democratic reforms domestically, all while maintaining the aesthetic of a Communist.
An 18 year old baby leftist today was nine years old at the onset of the war in Donbas. A lot of people becoming politically aware now might have very little understanding of what are to us, recent events.
I’m not clicking on that but like… kinda yeah
It’s taken me a number of years to ingest the amount of historical context I now have, which is still way less than a lot of people on here. You can’t really internalize a meaningful amount of context for events that happened before your lifetime or at least outside of your awareness, just by skimming a couple wiki articles once, and old relevant news articles are often hard to find, buried by whatever the current discourse is. What you can do though, is use your existing perspective on the world (judging by your CW, probably US exceptionalism) and make a lot of assumptions to come to a kneejerk conclusion.
Does that mean they’re not wrong to speak flagrantly on issues they have almost zero knowledge of? no, ofc not, but there will always be dipshits. Some will eventually learn, some will refuse to learn. They need to be taught “no investigation, no right to speak”, I guess.
Word. There’s just so, so, so much information. And until you’ve been in it for a long time you don’t even have a clue how much there is you don’t know, how much of what you “know” is rank propaganda. And I have huge advantages; I was lucky enough to go to uni and have genuine curmudgeonly old-school marxist professors and anti-capitalist professors who opened my eyes to all kinds of weird shit I had no idea about. And it still took me a long, long, long time to become a frothing unhinged big spoon commie. Like I didn’t really break with America until the al-Awlaki assassination, despite all the bullshit that came before that.
In fairness, young people often don’t have a huge awareness. I got involved politically very young, and the first major geopolitical event I really remember taking an interest in was the Taliban capture of Afghanistan in the late 1990s. I do remember the fall of the SU but something like the Gulf War 1 was ancient history, and Yugoslavia a sideshow (though one I remember my dad was very interested in)
It’s hard to have a historical scope when 2 years can represent 10% or your entire experience.
I don’t like defending a Redditor or a Vaushite, but the MSM has memory holed a ton of material about how corrupt and Fascist Ukraine is after the beginning of the Russian SMO. Even if you know that it’s there, some of these articles are genuinely very difficult to track down.
It also doesn’t help that very useful videos (like the Gravel Institute vid on Ukraine) were taken down because of tons of online bullying and the cowardice of the Gravel guys.
I wonder what HAMAS stands for? 🤔🤔
Highly Advanced Militarized Arab Strikeforce
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I think I’m just on the cusp of people who remember 9/11. I grew up near D.C. with parents who had a WaPo subscription and always watched CNN. I don’t really remember the Lewinski scandal, but in my kindergarten class I distinctly remember there was a poster explaining who George Bush and Al Gore were. So like even if I wasn’t getting good info, I was being acclimated to politics and had a head start on liberal disillusionment that was complete by the time I could vote.
It’s always jarring when I meet someone the same age as me who like just learned what the three branches of the US government are and what the different sides of World War II were yesterday.
