i personally think that the man who has fought against the genocide of palestinians literally his entire adult life and had one bad take about trans people a couple years ago probably doesn’t deserve to get executed by a revolution. asking this man to have takes on modern culture is just a dumb idea, and we should wall the people who got him to do it.
I personally don’t think it’s that hard to understand that liberation cannot be achieved for any oppressed group without liberation of every oppressed group
do you genuinely think trans liberation is contingent on either sacralizing or shooting an old man who has fought against the world’s two best propaganda machines his whole life? i’m not saying he gets a “bad trans takes” pass, just that it’s not a useful mental structure for building any kind of liberation. is your political project genuinely centered on finding jesus, or what?
that’s not what we’re talking about though. of course general full liberation, whatever we mean by that, will require intersectionality. my point is that do you think it’s actually worthwhile to discount every single person who has an uneducated and reactionary take that they spend very little time engaging with or defending? we’re not talking about a politician, or even a regular garden variety everyday transphobe reactionary. we’re talking about someone who has dedicated their entire life to trying to advocate for the specific and immediate case of palestinian emancipation. so we’re not talking about hypotheticals or building a communist movement in any particular place. we’re just talking about whether or not one should simply mentally dispose of the usefulness of norm finklestein despite his track record on the political situation of occupied Palestine.
Can I ask why you’re going to such great lengths to defend someone you have admitted yourself is a transphobe? Can you ask yourself why you thinking defending a transphobe is something that’s somehow valuable to leftism?
I’m defending an academic who got kicked out of academia for crossing Alan Dershowitz, an academic that has spent the majority of his time getting literally slandered, libeled, and sued for defending Palestinians. So I’m not defending his transphobia, I’m saying that his transphobia is an extreme L on his part that is bad for his own cause. But I don’t want to kill the man, and I think we have to consider him a genuine ally on the topic of Palestine. I’m not saying that all allies are allies on everything. Norm isn’t even a communist. But he’s also as old as my grandparents and didn’t drop his transphobia until he already had dementia. So I hope I answered your question in good faith, I’ll ask again, why do you think it’s productive to hate this old man for not being based on everything? I agree that he shouldn’t have said that shit. My grandma shouldn’t tell me that i’ll be mistaken for a girl for my long hair because that’s regressive and limited. For some reason though, I care a lot more about my grandma’s inability to have a meaningful material impact on my life and her life getting beaten by an alcoholic husband and that she has dementia. My point is that you seem to have this attitude that anyone that isn’t perfectly progressive on all identifiable issues is equally monstrous, and that itself is insane protestant type brainworms. it would be like saying should get the wall for his history of opposing LGBTQ+ liberation in Cuba for many decades. can you ask yourself whether that’s a reasonable standard for viewing people as valuable to leftism? i mean fidel even had a much larger impact on actual people because he wasn’t just an academic on an unrelated issue saying some hateful shit in his old age. he was the leader of the cuban revolutionary and his opinions impacted policy, impacted actual people’s lives for the worse.
yeah, i think holding up any single person for being good is stupid moralizing. we have because we like his takes on dead nazis, not because literally everything he did was good and based. marx himself had plenty of reactionary ideas, obviously we all tend to find his work useful and moving regardless.
Stalin wasn’t making videos about “gooning” in 2023, but yeah let’s go ahead and hold them to the same standard because historical context isn’t a thing.
Finkelstein has the time and energy to learn about and care about gooning enough to talk about it but doesn’t have the time and energy to learn about and care about trans rights, and y’all are defending him like he’s some liberation hero. Pretty fucked up
My dude, Finkelstein is an academic. He’s supposed to have good takes relative to the general population and relative to non-academic radicals. Like, that’s literally the role academics are supposed to play. “But Castro was homophobic!” Castro was too busy leading an army of militants that overthrew a comprador regime to be completely up to date on queer liberation. He’s allowed to have a few bad takes here and there since he didn’t sit on his ass all day reading books. And you quite conveniently left out the part where Castro did self-crit in front of the Cuban people for being a homophobic shithead and rightfully so. Where are we gonna see Finkelstein’s self-crit for being a raging transphobic piece of shit? Castro had to lead a nation facing a genocidal blockage, but still found the time to realize he made a grave mistake. What’s Finkelstein’s excuse?
I mean, that’s essentially the grounds on which i’m defending him in general. just that he’s consistently been one of the lonest and loudest voices on are particularly important topic that’s currently gotten heated up to active genocide again. he’s also an old old man who’s brain is melting. what i think is that no one should let him be near a camera again in his life because he said that dumb transphobic shit. also yeah, agreed on castro. i think castro improved himself greatly, especially on this issue, and i think it would have been the obvious counter to my point to mention that he was sort of busy not reading and actually dealing with shit. i understand that. but my general point is just that no one is orthodoxically perfect, and it’s odd to expect a dying old man to put it together. like this post in general, do people think norm is encountering the term “gooner” while browsing the internet? it should be upsetting to people that someone taught him this word. that’s essentially my only take i’m trying to have. that he’s an old old man who probably doesnt deserve “the wall” for something he said after his brain started melting from his fucking ears. it’s like parenti having had bad takes on the same in my opinion. if norm finklestein shows up saying transphobic slurs at my friends, i’ll beat his wrinkly ass. but that’s really just not what’s going on in my opinion. i hope this doesn’t come across as combative, i’m really just trying to sincerely talk about where the line should get drawn on how we think about certain people. maybe norm has been way more out and about on this than i think he was, and i’m basking in my own ignorance. i also recall he wrote a very stupid book about cancel culture, and it was something no one should have let someone in his condition write. but i’m not trying to put him on the pedestal, i’m not saying he shouldn’t be consistently and regularly rebuked for his very bad takes. it just seems distracting to me considering the ongoing genocide at hand.
I’ll ask again, why do you think it’s productive to hate this old man for not being based on everything?
Probably because I care a lot about my trans comrades and anyone who isn’t their ally isn’t mine either. It’s a shame you don’t, apparently. Intersectionality isn’t that complicated and yet you are just rabidly defending a transphobe because he apparently has some good ideas on a topic that you care about more than trans rights
You are the only one coming off as rabid here. It’s entirely possible to have a good faith conversation about this. Your interlocutor appears to be attempting that, and you’re coming off as entirely hostile from the offset and unwilling to engage with the responses.
yeah this is not a useful attitude for leftists, friend. I care a lot about my trans comrades and I’m trying to stay polite when being accused of not. i hate transphobia and most transphobes, and most of all our society that materializes that social hatred against trans people. but please, for the love of god, try to be a better materialist about this. norm finklestein has had a meaningful material impact on people in favor of not supporting the genocide of palestinians. surely it’s possible to understand the good he’s done, the bad he’s done, and the overall complexity of the person in question. are you trying to have a good faith discussion, or just attempting to make personal attacks? i want to make very clear, this man is not my hero, and i don’t have personal heroes. i just reject the idea that you should discount literally everyone if they aren’t a fully intersectional force for good. i recognize the vast amount of good he’s done advocating for palestinians and the relatively small amount of damage he’s done to trans people.
Just to be really really clear though:
Asserting that I care more about Palestinians than trans people is 1) a disgusting equivocation of two mostly unrelated movements for liberation and 2) almost a cruelly unserious thing to throw out there while over 10,000 Palestinians, half children, have been ethnically cleansed in the last month. We are literally only having this discussion because Norm is in the news advocating for a ceasefire and rights for Palestinians.
To put it in your style:
Palestinian freedom isn’t that complicated and yet you’re rabidly attacking a Palestinian advocate because apparently he had some bad ideas on a topic you care more about than the ongoing active bombing of a population center that is more dense than fucking Tokyo
I don’t think that’s reasonable, but it seems like that’s how you’re comfortable having a conversation with your comrades
you are treading on thin ice. this is really close to saying “i think you want to kill the man.” the vibe this gives makes me distrust your perspective. nobody has said anything remotely close to “let’s kill norm finklestein for his transphobia”
My point is that you seem to have this attitude that anyone that isn’t perfectly progressive on all identifiable issues is equally monstrous
infamousbit hasn’t said enough words to you for you to get this precise of a read on their ‘attitude’. you’re fabricating a portion of this whether you realize it or not
and that itself is insane protestant type brainworms
this is a big reach and does not help your image
it would be like saying castro should get the wall
again, you are fabricating a huge portion of this. nobody here is saying anything like this.
this is really close to saying “i think you want to kill the man.” the vibe this gives makes me distrust your perspective
what do you think the poster saying norm gets the wall means? i mean, i’m willing to admit that perhaps i’m too autistic to see it as a bit when I read it, but…? yes? they do seem to think a good revolution would kill the man?
does not help your image
i am an anonymous poster online, not a content creator, i genuinely don’t know what kind of image you think i do or don’t have, or do or don’t care about.
i think infamousbits attitude is generally defeatist and unhelpful and i’m trying to push back against that. i don’t think it’s a reach to say that “Norm Finklestein “gets the wall”” for having a bad take on something he knows nothing about and to most observers simply looked very foolish and uneducated is a regressive take by a person that does not seriously think it is possible to build a social movement for liberation. you can’t just prereject everyone that doesn’t already agree with you as deserving of being shot. I struggle with internal doomerism too, but I’m intellectually aware that you don’t build a movement if you think you fundamentally can’t reach or even engage with people that do not yet have intersectional attitudes.
and even if he’s not there, the math is really simple: you are really good at this one topic, you should be incredibly wary of making any statements on any other issues lest they make you look like a fucking asshole, lessening your impact on your main topic
part of the reason why it was so extremely frustrating to see norm saying that shit when he did. he spent his whole life fighting for a most righteous cause of liberation, and then shot through a ton of goodwill with people by saying that shit and doubling down.
i personally think that the man who has fought against the genocide of palestinians literally his entire adult life and had one bad take about trans people a couple years ago probably doesn’t deserve to get executed by a revolution. asking this man to have takes on modern culture is just a dumb idea, and we should wall the people who got him to do it.
I personally don’t think it’s that hard to understand that liberation cannot be achieved for any oppressed group without liberation of every oppressed group
do you genuinely think trans liberation is contingent on either sacralizing or shooting an old man who has fought against the world’s two best propaganda machines his whole life? i’m not saying he gets a “bad trans takes” pass, just that it’s not a useful mental structure for building any kind of liberation. is your political project genuinely centered on finding jesus, or what?
I think liberation without intersectionality is impossible, yes
that’s not what we’re talking about though. of course general full liberation, whatever we mean by that, will require intersectionality. my point is that do you think it’s actually worthwhile to discount every single person who has an uneducated and reactionary take that they spend very little time engaging with or defending? we’re not talking about a politician, or even a regular garden variety everyday transphobe reactionary. we’re talking about someone who has dedicated their entire life to trying to advocate for the specific and immediate case of palestinian emancipation. so we’re not talking about hypotheticals or building a communist movement in any particular place. we’re just talking about whether or not one should simply mentally dispose of the usefulness of norm finklestein despite his track record on the political situation of occupied Palestine.
Can I ask why you’re going to such great lengths to defend someone you have admitted yourself is a transphobe? Can you ask yourself why you thinking defending a transphobe is something that’s somehow valuable to leftism?
CW: Mention of Domestic Violence
I’m defending an academic who got kicked out of academia for crossing Alan Dershowitz, an academic that has spent the majority of his time getting literally slandered, libeled, and sued for defending Palestinians. So I’m not defending his transphobia, I’m saying that his transphobia is an extreme L on his part that is bad for his own cause. But I don’t want to kill the man, and I think we have to consider him a genuine ally on the topic of Palestine. I’m not saying that all allies are allies on everything. Norm isn’t even a communist. But he’s also as old as my grandparents and didn’t drop his transphobia until he already had dementia. So I hope I answered your question in good faith, I’ll ask again, why do you think it’s productive to hate this old man for not being based on everything? I agree that he shouldn’t have said that shit. My grandma shouldn’t tell me that i’ll be mistaken for a girl for my long hair because that’s regressive and limited. For some reason though, I care a lot more about my grandma’s inability to have a meaningful material impact on my life and her life getting beaten by an alcoholic husband and that she has dementia. My point is that you seem to have this attitude that anyone that isn’t perfectly progressive on all identifiable issues is equally monstrous, and that itself is insane protestant type brainworms. it would be like saying
should get the wall for his history of opposing LGBTQ+ liberation in Cuba for many decades. can you ask yourself whether that’s a reasonable standard for viewing people as valuable to leftism? i mean fidel even had a much larger impact on actual people because he wasn’t just an academic on an unrelated issue saying some hateful shit in his old age. he was the leader of the cuban revolutionary and his opinions impacted policy, impacted actual people’s lives for the worse.
Didn’t Stalin have bad takes on it too?
Let’s throw out the bath water with the whatever.
yeah, i think holding up any single person for being good is stupid moralizing. we have
because we like his takes on dead nazis, not because literally everything he did was good and based. marx himself had plenty of reactionary ideas, obviously we all tend to find his work useful and moving regardless.
Stalin wasn’t making videos about “gooning” in 2023, but yeah let’s go ahead and hold them to the same standard because historical context isn’t a thing.
Finkelstein has the time and energy to learn about and care about gooning enough to talk about it but doesn’t have the time and energy to learn about and care about trans rights, and y’all are defending him like he’s some liberation hero. Pretty fucked up
Stalin also led a war machine that buried millions of fascists. He’s allowed to have bad takes.
My dude, Finkelstein is an academic. He’s supposed to have good takes relative to the general population and relative to non-academic radicals. Like, that’s literally the role academics are supposed to play. “But Castro was homophobic!” Castro was too busy leading an army of militants that overthrew a comprador regime to be completely up to date on queer liberation. He’s allowed to have a few bad takes here and there since he didn’t sit on his ass all day reading books. And you quite conveniently left out the part where Castro did self-crit in front of the Cuban people for being a homophobic shithead and rightfully so. Where are we gonna see Finkelstein’s self-crit for being a raging transphobic piece of shit? Castro had to lead a nation facing a genocidal blockage, but still found the time to realize he made a grave mistake. What’s Finkelstein’s excuse?
I mean, that’s essentially the grounds on which i’m defending him in general. just that he’s consistently been one of the lonest and loudest voices on are particularly important topic that’s currently gotten heated up to active genocide again. he’s also an old old man who’s brain is melting. what i think is that no one should let him be near a camera again in his life because he said that dumb transphobic shit. also yeah, agreed on castro. i think castro improved himself greatly, especially on this issue, and i think it would have been the obvious counter to my point to mention that he was sort of busy not reading and actually dealing with shit. i understand that. but my general point is just that no one is orthodoxically perfect, and it’s odd to expect a dying old man to put it together. like this post in general, do people think norm is encountering the term “gooner” while browsing the internet? it should be upsetting to people that someone taught him this word. that’s essentially my only take i’m trying to have. that he’s an old old man who probably doesnt deserve “the wall” for something he said after his brain started melting from his fucking ears. it’s like parenti having had bad takes on the same in my opinion. if norm finklestein shows up saying transphobic slurs at my friends, i’ll beat his wrinkly ass. but that’s really just not what’s going on in my opinion. i hope this doesn’t come across as combative, i’m really just trying to sincerely talk about where the line should get drawn on how we think about certain people. maybe norm has been way more out and about on this than i think he was, and i’m basking in my own ignorance. i also recall he wrote a very stupid book about cancel culture, and it was something no one should have let someone in his condition write. but i’m not trying to put him on the pedestal, i’m not saying he shouldn’t be consistently and regularly rebuked for his very bad takes. it just seems distracting to me considering the ongoing genocide at hand.
when dementia becomes curable?
Probably because I care a lot about my trans comrades and anyone who isn’t their ally isn’t mine either. It’s a shame you don’t, apparently. Intersectionality isn’t that complicated and yet you are just rabidly defending a transphobe because he apparently has some good ideas on a topic that you care about more than trans rights
You are the only one coming off as rabid here. It’s entirely possible to have a good faith conversation about this. Your interlocutor appears to be attempting that, and you’re coming off as entirely hostile from the offset and unwilling to engage with the responses.
yeah this is not a useful attitude for leftists, friend. I care a lot about my trans comrades and I’m trying to stay polite when being accused of not. i hate transphobia and most transphobes, and most of all our society that materializes that social hatred against trans people. but please, for the love of god, try to be a better materialist about this. norm finklestein has had a meaningful material impact on people in favor of not supporting the genocide of palestinians. surely it’s possible to understand the good he’s done, the bad he’s done, and the overall complexity of the person in question. are you trying to have a good faith discussion, or just attempting to make personal attacks? i want to make very clear, this man is not my hero, and i don’t have personal heroes. i just reject the idea that you should discount literally everyone if they aren’t a fully intersectional force for good. i recognize the vast amount of good he’s done advocating for palestinians and the relatively small amount of damage he’s done to trans people.
Just to be really really clear though:
Asserting that I care more about Palestinians than trans people is 1) a disgusting equivocation of two mostly unrelated movements for liberation and 2) almost a cruelly unserious thing to throw out there while over 10,000 Palestinians, half children, have been ethnically cleansed in the last month. We are literally only having this discussion because Norm is in the news advocating for a ceasefire and rights for Palestinians.
To put it in your style:
Palestinian freedom isn’t that complicated and yet you’re rabidly attacking a Palestinian advocate because apparently he had some bad ideas on a topic you care more about than the ongoing active bombing of a population center that is more dense than fucking Tokyo
I don’t think that’s reasonable, but it seems like that’s how you’re comfortable having a conversation with your comrades
you are treading on thin ice. this is really close to saying “i think you want to kill the man.” the vibe this gives makes me distrust your perspective. nobody has said anything remotely close to “let’s kill norm finklestein for his transphobia”
infamousbit hasn’t said enough words to you for you to get this precise of a read on their ‘attitude’. you’re fabricating a portion of this whether you realize it or not
this is a big reach and does not help your image
again, you are fabricating a huge portion of this. nobody here is saying anything like this.
what do you think the poster saying norm gets the wall means? i mean, i’m willing to admit that perhaps i’m too autistic to see it as a bit when I read it, but…? yes? they do seem to think a good revolution would kill the man?
i am an anonymous poster online, not a content creator, i genuinely don’t know what kind of image you think i do or don’t have, or do or don’t care about.
i think infamousbits attitude is generally defeatist and unhelpful and i’m trying to push back against that. i don’t think it’s a reach to say that “Norm Finklestein “gets the wall”” for having a bad take on something he knows nothing about and to most observers simply looked very foolish and uneducated is a regressive take by a person that does not seriously think it is possible to build a social movement for liberation. you can’t just prereject everyone that doesn’t already agree with you as deserving of being shot. I struggle with internal doomerism too, but I’m intellectually aware that you don’t build a movement if you think you fundamentally can’t reach or even engage with people that do not yet have intersectional attitudes.
and even if he’s not there, the math is really simple: you are really good at this one topic, you should be incredibly wary of making any statements on any other issues lest they make you look like a fucking asshole, lessening your impact on your main topic
part of the reason why it was so extremely frustrating to see norm saying that shit when he did. he spent his whole life fighting for a most righteous cause of liberation, and then shot through a ton of goodwill with people by saying that shit and doubling down.