its so weird to me how hostile the ratsphere is to leftism, because like…yeah, the times its been tried havent been great, but also the times its been tried have almost always been when in severe extenuating circumstances (the USSR was like, pre-industrial, china had just fought a massive war that wrecked it, north korea was the site of a massive proxy war, and then lost its international support, etc etc) like. this seems like insufficient evidence for the proposition that “actually, the system where people freeze to death in the streets is the only good one”
Not sure what is meant by “leftism” specifically but I think the actual answer is “leftism as it exists in practice (in the English speaking world) is actually really hostile to autistic nerds.”
Culturally, it has a ton of unspoken rules that, politically, must remain unspoken, and this is combined with the conviction that people only ever break those unspoken rules through conscious malice.
Surprise! The autistic STEMlords don’t find that environment fun or inspiring.
Okay, maybe this is the time I can finally express this in a way that will make sense to people:
In any kind of subculture, there’s going to be differences between the stated values and principles of that subculture, and the actual values that people put into practice.
I really believe that American leftism has a higher seperation between stated values and actual values than most other subcultures, and a higher number of unstated values.
Like, I’ve said this before but for a long time I genuinely thought, “Hey, literally everyone in my social circle loudly agrees with me that gender roles are just arbitrary stereotypes, often based on sexist double standards, so that must mean that I can just wait for women to ask me out, and that ought to be a perfectly viable approach!”
This, of course, is not true.
I’m still incredibly pissed off, and it’s not so much that I’m pissed it isn’t true, I’m pissed nobody told me until I thought to ask.
And after asking multiple people, they all explained that they came to this conclusion more or less instinctively. It wasn’t explained that heterosexuality means men do almost all the asking, it was a conclusion that they had to “pick up on” or “realize”.
The stated values of all my peers were, “Gender roles are meaningless and we need to constantly, explicitly examine gendered behavior” and the actual values they were, “But come on, everyone knows that guys initiate, and since everyone knows it would be weird to, like, bring it up in conversation or get too hung up on it.”
I have a lot more examples.
Don’t get it twisted, this is not a proxy for “virtue” or “kindness”. A Nazi might have a very close match between his stated anti-Semitic values and his actual behavior in the world, that doesn’t make him a better person than your average vaguely woke leftist.
But Christ it’s hard for autistics to deal with places that have a ton of unspoken expectations, many of which are heavily in tension with the spoken values, and I really do think American leftism is worse than average about this.
How odd. I was a female through the dating years, and guys didn’t initiate relationships with me. I had to actively pursue romantic prospects in order to get any tail.
I think it’s actually that *nobody* asks others out and *anybody* who wants a relationship must pursue.



























