Here's an example:

In this channel, and when I talk to other environmentalists and/or leftists, I might talk about the false dichotomy of "natural" and "artificial." This is something I can discuss and explain at great length because I am working under the assumption that the people I am speaking to have a greater understanding of "natural" to begin with, even of they are using the language I am criticizing. Their scope of how the word "natural" might have historical, cultural, and social influences is much larger. It becomes more important in discourse about the "naturalness" of national parks, gardens, products, and so on and so forth.

But let's say I'm talking to an average person who might not understand why their monoculture lawn is a problem, and wants to know why. I am not doing them any favors by parsing the nuances of "artificial" and "natural," it is sufficient to communicate the benefits of a "natural landscape" because they probably have an idea of what that means in the context of the lawn they have - and I don't need to assume they think their lawn is "natural."

Now, if I do this, I DO run the risk of another environmentalist calling me a hypocrite for using a word I have actively criticized. I can explain that its neccessary strategically, but this is also just an acceptable risk in politics. I genuinely think that a lot of Democrats and "liberal" personalities are probably a lot further left than they let on, but they HAVE to meet the American public where they're at, and they know leftists are going to criticize what they say and what they do.

Which is a good thing, we should never stop criticizing democrats, but it's worth thinking about why Democrats don't really take leftist critique seriously, and it probably speaks to our lack of strategy and organization.

“My name is Aaron Bushnell. I am an active duty member of the United States Air Force and I will no longer be complicit in genocide. I am about to engage in an extreme act of protest, but compared to what people have been experiencing in Palestine at the hands of their colonizers, it’s not extreme at all. This is what our ruling class has decided will be normal. Free Palestine.”

—Aaron Bushnell

“The act of an American soldier sacrificing himself for Palestine is the highest sacrifice […] a poignant message to the American administration to stop its involvement in the aggression.”

—PFLP Central Media Dept.

Love that lore is a common word now

The Vampires’ Castle specialises in propagating guilt. It is driven by a priest’s desire to excommunicate and condemn, an academic-pedant’s desire to be the first to be seen to spot a mistake, and a hipster’s desire to be one of the in-crowd. The danger in attacking the Vampires’ Castle is that it can look as if – and it will do everything it can to reinforce this thought – that one is also attacking the struggles against racism, sexism, heterosexism. But, far from being the only legitimate expression of such struggles, the Vampires’ Castle is best understood as a bourgeois-liberal perversion and appropriation of the energy of these movements. The Vampires’ Castle was born the moment when the struggle not to be defined by identitarian categories became the quest to have ‘identities’ recognised by a bourgeois big Other.

The privilege I certainly enjoy as a white male consists in part in my not being aware of my ethnicity and my gender, and it is a sobering and revelatory experience to occasionally be made aware of these blind-spots. But, rather than seeking a world in which everyone achieves freedom from identitarian classification, the Vampires’ Castle seeks to corral people back into identi-camps, where they are forever defined in the terms set by dominant power, crippled by self-consciousness and isolated by a logic of solipsism which insists that we cannot understand one another unless we belong to the same identity group.

Mark Fisher, Exiting the Vampire's Castle

Interesting read.

imagine thinking this is a bad thing

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