I was way too tolerant of irony-poisoned, reactionary, faux-leftists for far too long on the hope our stated shared goals would be enough
The person I'm subtweeting---what do we call that on here?---started doing apologia for the invasion of Ukraine. You've heard it all before: NATO blah blah blah Iraq blah blah blah Russian nationals in Ukraine blah blah blah. The problem is that at a certain point you've taken your skepticism towards US conflicts abroad and cornered yourself into arguing that Russia, a right wing dictatorship, had some kind of basis to start an ethnic cleansing in the Ukraine. Whatever high minded principles we might find common ground on, that's genocide denial! You can't lick boots from the left because crawling under them is down.
I can't say I'm surprised. He---and it's almost always a he---is not the first leftist friend who has become completely unable to make plausible moral judgements about international order to score points against the US. It's an objectifying view of Ukrainian life and humanity of the Russian soldiers Putin is putting through the meat grinder in Eastern Ukraine, that they exist only as part of an ideological chess match between "The West" and everyone else. When centrists begin doing this about race, leftists are quick to point out that the difference between an out Nazi and someone who has the trappings of a centrist but the praxis of a Nazi is mostly one of respect and they are correct; what should they ask me to make of an aesthetic leftist whose praxis is opposing flawed democracies at the behest of right wing dictatorships?
And I'm intellectualizing this a bit. I'm also sad. I'm sad because it's the same impulse that lead a bunch of people to look at abortion rights and LGBT rights and went, "You know, maybe it will be good for the left if Trump wins." I'd rather be a compromised shitlib than sacrifice immigrants and Ukrainian civilians and trans men and rape survivors on the alter of ideology. It hurts when supposed ideological kin work themselves into a praxis that hurts people you care about it
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