Discover Top Posts Tagged with #liberal currents

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It's never just one minority.

In the space of a few years, the UK has moved from a broadly inclusive status quo to being the most aggressively anti-trans developed democracy in the world. Though pushed by a minuscule number of people, the assault has been full-spectrum—government, courts, press, the health system, radicalised internet groups, and violent vigilantes—all working simultaneously towards the same goal.

Precisely because this has taken place across multiple domains (and often in quite convoluted ways, with poor press coverage) the speed and scale of our transformation is often lost on people. But when considered together, it’s staggering.

#uk politics #trans rights #human rights #liberal currents #Toby Buckle

If you’re familiar with any of my posts featuring Liberal Currents articles then I encourage you to donate to them if you are able. Having an opposition media that specializes in both in-depth analysis and relentless attacks on the fascist creep, and one that publishes and welcomes transgender authors is sorely needed.

To fight fascism we need opposition media with a backbone. Liberal Currents is that. Help… Adam Gurri needs your support for The Liberal Cur

#liberal currents #us politics #history of liberalism

Talia Bhatt's new "Brown/Trans/Les" is a tour de force that reclaims the necessity of radical feminism in our pervasively misogynist age.

That struggle is universal, and there are epistemic and intellectual tools we can all share in order to help one another fight. Who do multiply-marginalised women ‘belong’ to, Bhatt asks? To, say, men of colour, or to an essentialised idea of a ‘nation’ that demands women reproduce it, or to a feminism that considers women of colour or trans people too ‘divisive’? Bhatt answers: “I am hers, who reaches across the barriers of time and space and nationhood, who sees my suffering as her own,” (39).

Let me be bold and say that this radical feminist credo is, also, liberalism. This is the humanistic mainspring of feminism, and what universalism can mean at its best. Not an obliteration of one’s unique needs or the particular beauty of one’s culture by a hegemon, but an understanding that the shared inheritance of our very humanity is something that can allow us to struggle together to build a better world. That human vulnerability and dignity is the shape of the horizon we’re marching towards.

Such a movement requires masses; it requires some degree of compromise, yes, but also common ground. Bhatt’s work ranges widely to provide a cartography of that common ground, not by averting difference but by elaborating on what it really means.

The purpose of all of this is to ask what we are doing? If the point is to change the world, then we need to look for practical ways forward, not merely finding cool subcultural signals to send to one another and parodically judging each other’s failures to do so. Bhatt is a determined foe of the idea that we should waste so much intellectual time on sussing out whether this or that activity of marginalized peoples might be problematic in some way: “Must enslaved Black women, queens in ball culture, and impoverished hijras be accused of reproducing the conservative foundations of the societies that abhor and expel them?” (162).

#liberal currents #feminism

Woke 2 is Woke 1 with an honest relation to power.

Woke 2 is a shitpost. Woke 2 is a meme. You see it drifting by on the timeline, unexplained. Yet to this empty signifier great import is attached. "Woke 2 is coming." People say this and what they mean is Godzilla is coming. Everyone knows what Woke 2 is. They know when they see it, instanter: an American flag borne through the tear gas, an incomprehensible rainbow-saturated meme explaining "you just lost to the woke agenda," eight million protesters shouting NO KINGS. ... Woke 2 invites you to action. An honest relation to power means having real, actionable demands for using state power to unfuck what has been broken. We do not need excavations: we need proposals. These proposals must be tethered to reality if they are to be successful.

#woke 2 #woke 2.0 #liberal currents #liberalism

Carter was panned at the time, and long after, but has been vindicated.

On July 15, 1979, Jimmy Carter delivered an address to the American people from the Oval Office. Formally known as “A Crisis of Confidence,” the address has since been memorialized as “the malaise speech,” and held up as a prime example of Carter’s morally rigid and politically inept presidency—one of the great last gasps of the miserable 1970s. Oil shortages, turbulence in the Middle East, and the lingering shadows of Watergate and the Vietnam War left Americans, in Carter’s view, morally and civically adrift. And, in what most analysts have considered a failure of a presidential speech, he told them so. Today, Americans face eye-watering prices at the pump thanks to an illegal and immoral war against Iran. And the world is reeling from President Trump’s naked threat to commit a genocide against the Iranian people, psychotically posting that “a great civilization will die.” And the problems that Carter identified mostly remain. Americans distrust one another and their government. We have declining rates of political participation and civic participation. Disinformation and resentment dominate our national conversations. And we continue to turn to populist salves for our problems, both real and perceived. What Carter did in his speech was something rare in the annals of democratic government: he confronted the people with the truth—about his own failings, about the reality of the world around them, and most importantly about themselves.

#liberal currents #jimmy carter #americam #us politics #goddammit america