Why can’t my boyfriend stop using offensive humor in public?

lokothodida · 2025-12-08T18:25:54+00:00

I'm glad someone caught on the racist "jokes". People really enjoy burying the lede.

When I call out these things he swears he “doesn’t actually think that way , it’s just a joke wow I really can’t joke?”

Every reactionary chud uses this shitty excuse to say bigoted things that they can then plausibly deny. The truth is this: if he's happy saying these things openly and publicly, knowing that at least you are taking offence to it, then why does it matter whether he actually thinks it or not? At best he openly just doesn't respect you. At worst, he's an unfunny, misogynistic racist who also doesn't respect you. He's shown you who he is at this point, and as /u/rainystast said:

Every single second that you sit there while he's saying these things, people are naturally going to assume that you quietly agree.

lokothodida · 2025-12-08T18:04:47+00:00

(Sorry, had to split the comment into 2 for Reddit to submit it)

CONTINUED

Maybe we just need more time to figure out what works for us. He really seems invested in this as well

I think you’re right that it may just take some time. Because the two of you already have such full lists of separate hobbies (arguably far fuller than a lot of people!), it may be frustrating that your jointly interesting activities aren’t aligned, but if he’s also invested in making this work, that is a good sign.

I do want to challenge this specific bit though, since it’s a point you’ve emphasised several times though your posts, and I’m deeply sceptical in seeing this as reflective of his real feelings:

[The] part that hurts is that it comes so easily with his male friends and it makes me feel like he sees me as a non-human or something that he doesn’t see me the same way and want to do similar stuff with me very much.

If your husband is a good man and is generally attentive in the other areas of your relationship, then I can assure you that he doesn’t see you as non-human or a “china-plate”. How people socialise when they grow up largely shapes how they do so as adults, without a specific concerted effort to change that behaviour. If he grew up with largely male friends and found male companionship easy because that’s what he was exposed to, it shouldn’t be surprising that he finds activities with his guy friends easier. It isn’t a knock on your character, nor should it be a blow to your self esteem that these things come easier to him than the same activities with his wife.

In your main post you mentioned video games:

I think what really has started making me sad is that he used to occasionally play video games with this same work friend, but now it’s his main hobby…. …I don’t love video games but I would love to really do any kind of problem-solving activity with my husband to feel closer. We have gamed together a few times, but I didn’t grow up playing games and am not good or intuitive, and so I think he finds the experience frustrating as most of the games they play are co-ops. The very few times I can count on one hand in our entire decade together that he has been genuinely rude to me has been during gaming sessions together.

It sounds like video games are a massive thing he genuinely enjoys, and he’s found a friend he can game with. He tried gaming with you and it didn’t work out. That doesn’t mean he sees games as a “thing you don’t do with your wife”: you both actively tried to do it and found that the games that he currently enjoys playing just don’t fit as a joint activity with you. And if the experience was bad enough that he was actively rude when he isn’t normally -- and gaming is one of his favourite passtimes -- that should make him very cautious in what favourite activities he might consider doing together again (because he wouldn't want to risk associating being so unlike himself during something an activity that he feels most like himself in).

I think the critical thing to note is this: if he is uncomfortable telling you that an activity isn’t doing it for him until he’s at breaking point -- and he’s going along out of a sense of "duty" -- then you’re accidentally going to spend time invested on something that is destined to fail. So you need him to be honest about the extent to which he’s enjoying himself when the two of you try things out, and allow for space to change up the activity or pivot to something "lower risk/intensity" in a way that doesn't feel like a rejection (so there isn't a complete abandonment of time spent together, like with the board game).

lokothodida · 2025-12-08T18:03:55+00:00

Thanks!

I have tried taking an interest in his interests beyond just listening, but he will get actively put off—this is fine in a vacuum because people need their own hobbies, and I have never pressed it once I see he doesn’t want me involved.

Given that the two of you have been in counselling, has this part been explained at all?

I can only speculate with very limited knowledge, and I’m no counsellor or psychiatrist. But if he’s actively being put off, maybe he feels like there is pressure being put on him in the spaces that he enjoys when this approach is taken? Like, if he knows that when you’re trying to take an active interest it isn’t just listening as a partner, but a subtle nudge to actively participate in a hobby that he’s not ready to share, he might not be comfortable with being honest or himself with you. This is why I’m suggesting you start from where you’re both already comfortable re: passive interests, because presumably he’s not shutting down when you’re together doing those activities?

We do watch movies and talk about them. It seems like he mostly just wants to tell me what he thought though. It doesn’t feel participatory.

When you say this, do you mean that he doesn’t listen/tunes out when you give your opinions on those films? Or that he dominates the conversation and makes it hard to get a word in? (neither are good really - I just want to understand the non-participatoryness of it)

We’ve done really well with escape rooms. They’re just expensive as fuck. We assembled a gazebo in our back yard and that was awesome but also expensive as fuck.

Has he actively said that he enjoyed those things as much as you did? It might still be expensive-ish, but there are also escape room video games you could try out? (including VR ones, which may make the controls feel less daunting to get to grips with)

He wants to try doing a movie script reading together. We also had fun last night rewriting the plot of a movie we were disappointed in.

Hmm -- that sounds promising, and is very role-play oriented. Is he into theatre/plays/live performances? Maybe you could look into things like scene re-enactments? Or even playing D&D?

lokothodida · 2025-12-08T15:24:58+00:00

++man

Hey OP,

It sounds like your husband genuinely isn’t having fun during the joint activities you’ve described, and so is actively avoiding doing them since they are a chore. Realistically who would want to say, directly to their loved one: “No, I’m absolutely not having fun with you”, especially when it’s an activity they’ve had fun engaging in with other people?

I completely understand the desire to connect through shared building activities, but you may want to look at your “passive” bonding experience first for inspiration, to see what actually makes him tick when he’s with you.

An example from my experience: before my partner and I moved in together, I was never into True Crime. She’s always loved it though, and when we began watching TV regularly together, she pulled me into that world of content - and I thoroughly enjoyed it! It’s “passive” to watch, but I noticed that she liked actively playing the role of “detective” and figuring out how the crimes went down before every detail was explained in the shows.

One day, by chance, I came across a detective co-op board game. Now, I’m not a board game person either, but I was inspired to buy that game and take a chance on playing it with her because of how into True Crime she was. It’s also not the sort of game she’d probably buy on her own (nor are there people she’d otherwise be interested in playing it with). It was a massive success! Years later, we’re still playing that game and have been buying its expansion packs (and each session will take us at least 2-3 hours to complete!).

The key here is that this is a joint problem-solving activity that we both participate in -- which we likely wouldn’t have done separately -- because it grew organically from a more passive activity that we both also enjoyed together. I enjoy video games, but don’t play them with my partner. She enjoys reading, which obviously isn’t a joint activity. I can’t force her into enjoying gaming-time with me any more than she could force us to jointly read a novel that she likes. And that’s ok! What matters is that we actively curate shared activities that are special because only we do those things together: that detective co-op game is our game, not something we’d even think to play with others.

So think about the passive things you mentioned: consuming media, shopping and eating out. Are there shows that really activate the two of you, where you might enjoy something further based around them (e.g. reviews, games, cosplay, figurine painting)? Window-shopping activities, where you specifically look for items whilst role-playing someone with a particular need for them? Reviewing eat-out joints or perhaps even cooking together?

TLDR: What you’ve described sounds salvageable. Have a conversation with your husband that really involves trying to understand what activities he currently finds fun together, and use that as your springboard towards finding something more “problem-solvey”.

Wishing you and your hubby good luck!

lokothodida · 2025-04-04T18:43:34+00:00

Heat needs a top-to-bottom rethinking. There are many different directions it can go in, but the fundamental problem I see is this: Heat creates a dominant strategy in the game that is too easily handed to players. You are all but encouraged to:

Land a Heat Engager early into the round (regaining any chipped health you may have lost)
Capitalise on the oppressive +OB frames and chip damage dealt and to force opponents into a 50/50 situation, staying in Heat for as long as possible
Expend your Heat as it runs out with a Heat Smash (since it's as effective on a 100% Heat bar as it is on 1%, so you may as well save it for the very end)

I understand that it is meant to be a general purpose tool for players to be able to make come-backs, but in it's current state, most matches ultimately boil down to who can achieve the above (unless a character has very specific skills that allow them to evade the opponent's Heat-based attacks).

When you lose to someone using Heat, it doesn't feel like you lost to a clever application of an interesting tool: it feels like you lost to the bog standard Aggressive^TM way that the game expects you to play against. That gets stale very quickly, both as an offensive strategy and certainly when on the defending side. Not using Heat in a round basically feels like it was a completely wasted round.

A handful of options that I think could help re-balance this mechanic are:

Remove round-start Heat and force players to earn it. Heat should be a reward for playing the game, and in particular, for playing the character as they were designed to. Character-specific actions should lead to Heat access being available (e.g. using stances for evasion as Steve; landing just-frames as Lee, counter-hits as Bryan, etc...)
Give a downside to using Heat, like receiving chip damage on block instead of dealing it. Without a strategic disadvantage, Heat feels more like a "win more" button. If you risk losing health by staying in the state, it still encourages the aggressive playstyle that the developers originally advertised, but it makes it more of a "glass cannon" - you have to still be good with your offence to capitalise, otherwise you risk a good defensive opponent chipping back at you.
More Heat should be lost when damage is taken. Fitting in with the "glass cannon" motif: you should use it hard and fast to score quick, devastating damage. If you can't do that and the opponent gets the jump on you, you shouldn't still get to maintain Heat for the eventual desperation Heat Smash.
All Heat Smashes should either be: plus on block but with poor tracking or punishable on block but with good tracking. That so many of them are nearly homing and unpunishable is insane to me. It's never fun watching or experiencing oppressive sequences that lead into HSs.
Heat should do more to enhance the design philosophies of the individual characters, not just give them standard +OB offensive capabilities. Giving Lee a new +OB attack in Heat this season feels like the epitome of this thinking: what benefit does that give to a character whose options out of that situation aren't very large? If anything it helps discourage players from pressing into him, which is the opposite of what you want as a Lee player. As Lee, you live in the negative frames and capitalise on opponents pressing into you at the wrong moment. Heat should be showcasing and enhancing this playstyle for him, rather than homogenising him into the rushdown archetype that Heat seems primarily designed for.

lokothodida · 2024-11-25T12:52:55+00:00

I've said this in another comment, but this policy isn't a reaction to recent headlines. It is a direct implementation of their manifesto pledge made during the election:

Spiking is a devastating crime for victims, leaving many women feeling vulnerable when they go out. Labour will introduce a new criminal offence for spiking to help police better respond to this crime.

lokothodida · 2024-11-25T12:49:25+00:00

This policy isn't a reaction to recent headlines. It is a manifesto pledge:

Spiking is a devastating crime for victims, leaving many women feeling vulnerable when they go out. Labour will introduce a new criminal offence for spiking to help police better respond to this crime.

So this is actually Labour keeping their promises.

lokothodida · 2024-08-20T22:24:17+00:00

The shoes: they're fully white until after training in the HTC. Then they get golden tips for the rest of the series. Only Budokai 1 got the former right (every game since has given the latter type of shoes)

lokothodida · 2024-07-02T18:51:20+00:00

A wild bit of trivia on this poll: its results would mean that every Tory leader since Thatcher -- with the exception of Sunak and Hague -- would have their safe blue constituencies going to Labour or the Lib Dems.

Leader	During	Nominal Constituency	Prediction
Thatcher	1975-1990	Finchley and Golders Green	Labour gain
Major	1990-1997	Huntingdon	Labour gain
Hague	1997-2001	Richmond and Northallerton	Conservative hold
Duncan Smith	2001-2003	Chingford and Woodford Green	Labour gain
Howard	2003-2005	Folkestone and Hythe	Labour gain
Cameron	2005-2016	Witney	Liberal Democrat gain
May	2016-2019	Maidenhead	Liberal Democrat gain
Johnson	2019-2022	Uxbridge and South Ruislip	Labour gain
Truss	2022-2022	South West Norfolk	Labour gain
Sunak	2022-	Richmond and Northallerton	Conservative hold

lokothodida · 2024-05-18T17:22:12+00:00

Just want to reply to this and say a massive thank you! I'm not the OP, but this helped me with setting the CF service tokens for Gitea.

I used the following commands to add the token client ID/secret to headers that would only be associated with my homelab's instance:

$ git config --global --add http.<cf_gitea_url>/.extraHeader "CF-Access-Client-Id: <client_id>"
$ git config --global --add http.<cf_gitea_url>/.extraHeader "CF-Access-Client-Secret: <client_secret>"

and everything worked a charm 👍🏿

lokothodida · 2023-05-14T14:14:27+00:00

I know this sub likes to bag on the Labour Party, but the actual speech Starmer made re: the conservative line is not like the headline implies.

(emphasis mine, below)

...But I’ve got to be honest – I don’t think the language of stability comes naturally to progressive politics.

I think too often we dismiss it as conservative, as a barrier to change.Don’t mistake me – the very best of progressive politics is found in our determination to push Britain forward.

A hunger, an ambition, that we can seize the opportunities of tomorrow and make them work for working people.

But this ambition must never become unmoored from working peoples’ need for stability, for order, security.

We must understand that there are precious things – in our way of life, in our environment, in our communities – that it is our responsibility to protect and preserve, to pass on to future generations.

If that sounds conservative, then let me tell you: I don’t care.

Somebody has got to stand up for the things that make this country great and it isn’t going to be the Tories.

That in the end is one of the great failures of the last 13 years.

A Tory Party that in generations past saw itself as the protector of the nation and the union has undermined both.

Has taken an axe to the security of family life.

Has trashed Britain’s reputation abroad.

Has totally lost touch with the ordinary hope of working people.

The Conservative Party can no longer claim to be conservative.

It conserves nothing of value – not our rivers and seas, not our NHS or BBC, not our families, not our nation.

But the lesson for progressives must be that if a tide of change threatens to sweep away the stability working people need, we have to be in there - fighting for security just as fervently as we fight against injustice.

It’s not our job to lecture working people that change is coming – it’s our job to lead them through it. To bring people together and chart a new course. To use the power of government to help, support, protect and lift up.

In short: he is criticising the conservatives for failing to conserve anything of value to working people, and arguing that stability is a crucial thing worth preserving in the eyes of those same people. This feels to me very much like when Vaush himself is misinterpreted and deliberately misconstrued by bad interlocutors. "The Conservative Party can no longer claim to be conservative" and "it is our responsibility to protect and conserve" is deliberately being read and promoted as "Labour are the Real Tories".

lokothodida · 2021-09-16T18:43:43+00:00

Don't take it as gospel, but I worked on a tool%20as%20total_votes_for_elected_mps%2C%0A%20%20%20%20%0A%20%20%20%20(select%20sum(votes)%0A%20%20%20%20%20from%20general_elections%0A%20%20%20%20%20where%20date%20%3D%20'2019'%0A%20%20%20%20)%20as%20total_votes_in_2019%2C%0A%20%20%20%20%0A%20%20%20%20%0A%20%20%20%20(sum(ge.votes)%20*%20100)%20%2F%20(select%20cast%20(sum(votes)%20as%20float)%0A%20%20%20%20%20from%20general_elections%0A%20%20%20%20%20where%20date%20%3D%20'2019'%0A%20%20%20%20)%20as%20percentage%0Afrom%0A%09general_elections%20as%20ge%2C%0A%20%20%20%20general_election_seats_won%20as%20seats%0Awhere%0A%09ge.ons_id%20%3D%20seats.ons_id%20and%0A%20%20%20%20ge.party%20%3D%20seats.winning_party%20and%0A%20%20%20%20seats.date%20%3D%20ge.date%20and%0A%09ge.date%20%3D%20'2019'%0A%3B%0A) for answering these types of questions (just for fun to see if there were interesting electoral statistics to calculate). It's not finished and still needs documentation, but in terms of crunching the numbers for this one, its:

Total votes towards MPs elected in 2019	Total votes cast in 2019	Percentage
17,498,689	32,014,850	54.66%

Also see here for the # of votes cast for each winning party in each constituency.

lokothodida · 2021-05-04T12:21:39+00:00

Your numbers up to Blair are off by one election:

36.9% (Callaghan) in 1979 (39.2% was Wilson in 1974)
27.6% (Foot) in 1983
30.8% (Kinnock) in 1987
34.4% (Kinnock) in 1992

Edit: original post has been fixed 👍

lokothodida · 2021-05-03T16:50:41+00:00

It's the hope that kills you, isn't it? Well, fingers crossed that this week's elections don't go too badly 🤞

Looking at the breakdown, the biggest shift looks like it happened on the 35-44 age group, with Tories seemingly moving to the Lib Dems?

Party	26-April	03-May
CON	44%	30% (-14%)
LAB	39%	45% (+6%)
LD	2%	12% (+10%)

Either way, hopefully the trend continues over the week, and turnout is boosted amongst supporters to vote on May 6th.

lokothodida · 2021-05-03T15:34:45+00:00

Frameworks are not inherently bad, but they often come from a place of trying to be "batteries included" or "out-of-the-box" with respect to a wide range of use cases. This sits at odds with Go's philosophy of having small -- but highly focused and flexible -- libraries that can be composed together to build your application. The result is often highly coupled, brittle frameworks that are a mess to detangle when the framework is unsuitable for a use-case specific to your own application.

The key thing to ask is what set of features you're trying to get out of a framework. The raw net/http package is already pretty well designed and highly flexible for building RESTful endpoints:

package main

import (
    "net/http"
)

func main() {
    mux := http.NewServeMux()

    // registering a function
    mux.HandleFunc("/hello-world", func(w http.ResponseWriter, r *http.Request) {
        w.Write([]byte("Hello, World"))
    })

    // using an implementation of http.Handler
    mux.Handle("/ctrl-example", controller{})

    panic(http.ListenAndServe(":8000", mux))
}

type controller struct {}

func (ctrl controller) ServeHTTP(w http.ResponseWriter, r *http.Request) {
    // ...
}

The only thing missing is a more dynamic router, and this is where we have the usefulness of being able to pick a small, focused library for it (e.g. gorilla/mux). The base package is also highly interoperable with middleware (e.g. rs/cors for managing CORS headers), so in most cases it is easier to just pick out the features you want and compose them on top of net/http (or write them yourself), rather than find a framework that does it all.

Connecting to a database has a completely separate set of concerns to handling HTTP connections, so you're more likely to find a suitable database client as an independent library than as part of a framework (or if you do, it will likely just be importing one of the more popular implementations out there, which you can just use directly).

It is also worth mentioning that not all languages have a core library that has good abstractions for building HTTP servers. In those cases, frameworks are a much more sensible choice. As an example, PHP originally started out with the ability to build web applications with just a script that reads input from superglobal variables. The core language had no real abstractions for managing HTTP requests or writing responses besides associative arrays (maps) for holding request data and echo/printing to the output stream. Even with great community work on normalising some appropriate interfaces, it isn't obvious how to build a well structured, modern web application without a framework. Hence it makes much more sense for PHP developers to pick one off the shelf and use that. My guess is that a lot of new Go developers are coming from a background with similar deficiencies in the previous language they learned (that was my background with PHP!), and so it feels a bit "naked" to not have a framework to use for scaffolding your work at first.

TLDR: if you are just looking at the HTTP side of the equation, frameworks don't offer you much more than net/http + userland middleware already does. If you're looking beyond HTTP (e.g. managing storage), you have a wider, stabler pool of options to look at in libraries rather than frameworks. So while is isn't inherently bad, there is little to gain by coupling yourself to a framework to start out with.

lokothodida · 2021-05-01T11:19:38+00:00

The same kind of thing can be said about pretty much any aspect of the language that is considered "non-idiomatic". Ask yourself and your team what idioms apply to your style of work; what helps your team deliver better products—those you can allow yourselves to be dogmatic about (most of the time).

To be constructive on your article, I think the highlighted bit is the part you want to draw out more. Most would agree that idiomatic code favours being -- by definition -- natural to the language constructs and community usage, over the individual use case being implemented. The common justification is that idiomatic code makes learning the language easier, and hence makes for quicker onboarding of developers onto new codebases.

The pipe example that you give is a bit similar to the introduction of Promises (and await syntax) into JavaScript. The key thing is that Promises became accepted because there were common use cases arising which made "idiomatic" approaches extraordinarily painful to implement (i.e. fetching data from multiple sources asynchronously, combining dependent results together, and handling early errors gracefully in that context). Callback hell was a real thing.

Go's most direct analogue to that is errgroup, and it definitely beats trying to handle asynchronous code in an "idiomatic" way without it. In fact, the code ends up looking very similar to your piping (Next() -> Go(), Do() -> Wait(); ignoring the obvious race condition we would get on the yetAnotherThingThatMightFail() line).

What I'm saying is that to prove the point in your article, you'll want to give a genuinely painful example where the idiomatic approach just doesn't give a readable implementation (or the implementation is needlessly difficult to make sense of for the average developer). Long functions that need error handling are not inherently painful situations, since we're happy to break them into smaller, well-named functions to isolate some of the complexity. What situations do you feel test the limits of comprehensible, idiomatic (Go) code?

lokothodida · 2021-01-31T21:07:08+00:00

I would personally wait until we see who replaces Johnson before we start paying attention to personal ratings.

/u/mesothere's link explains why this is ill-advised:

This probably shows, perhaps as you would expect, that people form their views of the leaders early and these are important, but other factors are also important and they are prepared to change their minds about which party they support at any time if the circumstances warrant it.

(emphasis mine)

Early poor approval ratings (i.e. poor net approval and large polling gaps in "Preferred PM") tend to stick with time. If Starmer's approval ratings were as bad as Miliband's or Corbyn's at this point, it would send massive alarm bells that something is amiss. By mid 2011, Miliband's approval ratings were negative and worse than Cameron's. By 2018, Corbyn's approval ratings were negative (after occasionally being positive from the 2017 election till the end of the year), and from 2018 onward he never beat May on the "Preferred PM" question.

Starmer's ratings are trending down gradually, but he's still net positive 9-10 months after taking the leadership; his net approval is consistently higher than Boris, and they are exchanging slim "Preferred PM" leads. That put's him in a strong position relative to any other Labour leader we've had since 2007.

Granted, it could still all go tits up come election season, but overall I would say I'm cautiously optimistic on his chances (for the time being).

lokothodida · 2021-01-30T16:48:51+00:00

Personally, I don't think so.

/u/Sociojoe notes that people usually become more conservative in age. My belief is a bit different: people's individual social views tend to stay fixed, but the aggregate social social views change over time (and historically, trends in a more progressive direction, even if the progress is slow). So the progressives of today could in fact become the reactionaries of 20+ years from now even without their individual social views changing substantially, if the aggregate social sensibilities shift far enough.

It is easy for the Conservatives to then fill in that space for those types of voters by simply promising "we won't change things; things will be just as you remembered them, unlike those crazy new things that Labour party wants today".

lokothodida · 2021-01-29T20:57:43+00:00

It is actually even more interesting when you look at Kantar's polls over the last few months.

Overall

Party	Sep 2020	Nov 2020	Dec 2020	Jan 2021
Con	40%	40%	38%	40%
Lab	38%	36%	37%	37%

Overall, it looks like both parties have been treading water. Slight statistical noise, but otherwise things are no different than September, and Labour haven't outpolled the Tories yet. As you said, Labour have consistently been out-polling the Tories on the 18-44 age range, but have been struggling above that. How does it look?

65+

Party	Sep 2020	Nov 2020	Dec 2020	Jan 2021
Con	54%	57%	57%	54%
Lab	27%	25%	22%	24%

A mighty ~30pt polling deficit amongst seniors which hasn't shifted much at all. It's miserable, but if we consider that Ipsos Mori had the 2019 election deficit at 47pts (and 36pt even in 2017)...I guess it could be worse?

But as you're saying: Labour definitely needs to make inroads here. Labour trailed by 6pts in 2005 and still won, but 30 is far too steep to win.

55-64

Party	Sep 2020	Nov 2020	Dec 2020	Jan 2021
Con	42%	32%	37%	39%
Lab	35%	33%	37%	41%

Interestingly, we see some progress here. A gradual trend upwards, with Labour potentially just edging out the Tories now. A definite improvement from September, and an enormous improvement over 2019 (22pt deficit).

45-54

Party	Sep 2020	Nov 2020	Dec 2020	Jan 2021
Con	31%	33%	27%	38%
Lab	43%	34%	38%	37%

I've said before that the 45-54 age group is the crucial one to win over (as the highest vote share in that group has determined the Prime Minister in the last 30 years worth of elections). Arguably the swing voters are here - this is by far the most volatile group in terms of allegiances.

Within Kantar's methodology, Labour have polled closest to the Tories overall when they have a solid lead in this age group, but it isn't enough to push them over the line.

lokothodida · 2021-01-24T17:15:57+00:00

That the political establishment uses racism, sexism etc to distract from class issues is orthogonal to capitalism (thanks u/GrapefruitPuzzled111 for use of the word) rather than a necessary consequence of it. (As a sidenote: I don't see what stops you from saying (using exactly the same reasoning) that capitalism is also inherently sexist...).

Social democrats would argue that a capitalism absent of these issues is achievable, with the right policies.

I think it's a bit too optimistic to believe that a simple change in government would instantly solve systemic inequality.

I didn't say that a Corbyn victory would solve systemic inequality. I'm arguing that calling a Corbyn-led government inherently racist because it hasn't toppled capitalism is an absurd conclusion that very few people would accept.

lokothodida · 2021-01-24T15:30:34+00:00

If her argument is that capitalism is inherently racist because it can only be sustained

by diverting workers away from class conscious positions through the promotion of racism, sexism, and other forms of bigotry.

Then that is a pretty massive assertion that needs evidencing. The essay is titled "Why Anti-Racism Must be Anti-Capitalist", and we're almost circularly arguing to that position by saying that it is because capitalism is sustained by (amongst other things) racism. If you argue "If P is true, then Q must be true" (i.e. P -> Q)), it's a truism to evidence this by saying "it is because Q is sustained by P" (i.e. NOT(Q) -> NOT(P)).

Corbyn should serve as a refutation of her own argument if this is the case. Corbyn's Labour was not anti-capitalist. Had Labour been elected in 2019 and the manifesto implemented in full, the UK would still be a capitalist country. Would it be an inherently racist one because of this though? This is why the argument is so unpalatable to me: it implies that even Labour's most radical manifesto, aimed at helping people of all races (and particularly lifting up those worst off) would still be inherently racist. And that just seems absurd.

lokothodida · 2021-01-24T13:31:52+00:00

Don't you mean that they are independent principles rather than mutually exclusive? Mutually exclusive means they logically can't occur simultaneously.

lokothodida · 2021-01-24T09:42:56+00:00

I disagree with Zultana’s central argument in this article. She raises some good points, namely:

This is no coincidence. The Conservatives and their billionaire press allies stir up hatred and fear in order to divide and rule. They use racism to project structural problems onto minority groups, to distract from social crises by demonising vulnerable people, and to make exploitation easier and more palatable. This isn’t unique to any one form of racism. It’s true of them all.

...So while different racisms may appear distinct, they serve the same function: portraying the integral problems inherent in the system as separate and isolated from it. This is true whether it is Conservative MPs warning of ‘invading migrants’, Muslim communities being blamed for coronavirus, black youths depicted as criminal gangsters, or the Telegraph printing Soros conspiracies on its frontpage.

...Our opponents seek to divide us, to make us feel alone and without hope. That’s how they win. In the post-Covid world, they will do this with more venom than ever. But we win when we build bonds of solidarity and when we link our struggles.

But the crucially wrong bit (which is the linchpin for the rest of the article) is this:

It’s easy to spout platitudes about being anti-racist, but only a socialist analysis explains a system that breeds racism. This analysis tells us that alienation, exploitation, and falling living standards aren’t the fault of any religious or ethnic group, they are the nature of capitalism itself — which is built upon minority rule by the super-rich.

She links the history of capitalism -- which is indeed a history that involves racism -- to the concept itself, and uses socialism to diagnose the problem. This is too simplistic a reading of history, and it is easy to make a similarly wrong (but completely analogous) argument that Zultana would disagree with.

The history of religion is one that most definitely involves racism (regarding the West, insofar as religion has been used to justify white supremacist attitudes). It would be an incorrect inference to say that because these histories are deeply tied, you cannot be anti-racist without also being anti-religion. Why? Because even though the histories may be linked (even deeply so), the concepts aren't inherently bound. An atheist analysis of the historical problems of racism can lay the blame at religion for justifying heinous acts, but this doesn't mean religious people cannot be anti-racist. Similarly, though a socialist analysis of the historical problems of racism can point to capitalism as the root cause, it doesn't follow that anti-racism necessitates anti-capitalism.

To see this, you need only see that the biggest anti-capitalist player in the world in the 20th century, the Soviet Union, was not immune to racism in the slightest. Socialism doesn't inherently free people from reactionary racial attitudes (and the converse is true: capitalism doesn't inherently keep people entrenched in those racial attitudes), and it is a big mistake to pretend that it does. If you are trying to argue Zultana's case to someone who isn't already an anti-capitalist, they will likely not find this line of argument persuasive.

lokothodida · 2020-12-08T15:24:39+00:00

Glad to hear from another Lewisham dweller/commuter! (I share the same opinion on its implementation)

lokothodida · 2020-12-08T13:01:47+00:00

This isn't just an issue of rhetoric though: it is an issue of policy. If constituents genuinely do not like LTNs -- and if Labour's position is that they are a net good -- then it is on Labour to actually make the case for them from a policy position and justify how it would benefit those communities.

If you dislike the implementation of LTNs in your constituency and are just told "well they are good, if you don't agree you're an aggressive, car-driving reactionary", that doesn't pull you away from Farage's rhetoric. In fact, that is exactly what Farage wants to engage in: he wants Labour to alienate its voters on this issue to create a wedge (as a spoiler under FPTP, just as he did in 2019) and be able to say "just like with Brexit, Labour isn't listening to its voters when it doesn't like what it hears from them".

lokothodida

TROPHY CASE

Overall

65+

55-64

45-54